Great work on the article and video!

I've played with RD's especially Gray Scott a lot in Gollygang/Ready, and found some fascinating behaviours that I then brought into Houdini for visualisation, here's a couple of examples:

https://youtu.be/4dWJ504FULw?si=lWBrhaL2J12o58e1

https://youtu.be/Naj_J8aznyk?si=lb0WrkrUaCDg-Rzl

One thing that can help them to look nicer (in my opinion) is a reinterpretation of the reagent values as specific colours before display.. even something as simple as: pow(Uucolor,upow) + pow(Vvcolor,vpow) can be nice with well-picked ucolor&vcolor and powers. Other possibilities like hsv-to-rgb on the values can be pretty interesting too!

This reminds me of this other work[1], which is also a fascinating example of emergence from a dynamical system. Instead of a chemical reaction model, it's a model of slime mold growth, as a system of particles and some update rules. They haven't posted new work in a while, but you can still see many video renderings on their twitter[2] using variants of it that are absolutely mesmerizing.

[1] "Physarum" by Sage Jenson https://cargocollective.com/sagejenson/physarum

[2] https://x.com/mxsage

I considered trying to do something like this for CFD (specifically to see if I could show how lift is created by airflow over an airfoil). I got kind of stuck on it though and gave up, too far out of my area. Awesome to see others doing things like this though, feels like it’s an area ripe for exploitation!

This is really cool, it looks like it's pretty easy to get started with Shadertoy and your guidance.

One nitpick: in section 2.1.1 on implementing the reactions, you refer to "simulating the reaction A + 2B -> C"; should this have "4C"?

That is extremely cool, very fine work thanks for sharing!

I agree some of the MNCA examples are very reminiscent of things that various RD's do, the one titled "A more complex MNCA example" has a similar oscillating-worms feel to something I found in a modified Gray Scott:

https://youtu.be/Naj_J8aznyk?si=lb0WrkrUaCDg-Rzl

I just took a look at your Shadertoy profile and I liked it a lot

I want to try my hand at writing such a general case continuous cellular automata engine, but I first need to dive into the literature around Lenia, and this is only one of the many things I want to try...

Anyway, thanks for sharing your work. I took a quick look at your write-up and will definitely come back to it later.

I've often thought it would be heaps of fun to try to build a playful dynamic UI (perhaps for use in a game or something) where all the elements are are made from 'living' components, say CA's like your MNCA or perhaps reaction-diffusion. I would love to collaborate on some experiments around that if you'd be interested?

Your work with MNCAs is amazing and an inspiration.

Woah cool ! Thanks for the share

I'm not sure there is much more relations to actual chemistry than what I put in the "Prerequisites" section. You can also look the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which is (at a very basic level) a real world instance of a reaction-diffusion system that acts similarly to this model.