Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata

I spy a Model m keyboard and a 17” crt compaq monitor

OP you’re amazing. It’s nice to see kids today can grow up to exposed to the same hardware I’m assuming you (well, me too, so us) grew up with!

People who grow up using these sorts of bespoke software are gonna have some pretty weird nostalgia. "Hey when you were a toddler did you ever play with a paint app where the fill tool created flashing swirly patterns? ...no?"

Using the pattern on the top left of the array of patterns I clicked several times and got a setup where it was still flood filling after maybe 10 minutes.

Unlike all the other times I'd tried where it quickly ended up with black or white dominating and then filling the whole area (except once when it became all white except for a single black pixel) this ended up with the whole area filled with a checkerboard pattern except for a jagged fault line running from top to bottom. The waves of filling would cause small changes to the fault line, and occasionally a small island of black or white would form and then be taken over by the checkerboard.

I was going to let it go for a lot longer but accidentally did the "back" gesture on my mouse bringing me back here. I've tried several times since then but that is the only time I got something that was long running.

Anyone else get any interesting long running ones?

Looks great! A similar (alphabet-centric) program with even more limited/robust operation is AlphaBaby: https://www.littlepotatosoftware.com/products/AlphaBaby-maco...

Good Lord what is happening in there?

These screenshots look awesome. Definitely checking this one out. Thanks for this!

What a wonderful looking piece of software :) My child is far past toddler age but I shall keep this in mind as a gift for friends of mine that are about to have children.

I love this! It's like the cellular automata painting system I've been working on for a long time, which I rewrote in JavaScript a while ago, and is in serious need to rewriting, but runs pretty fast now anyway in spite of itself.

I recorded this demo for Norman Margolus, one of the creators of the CAM-6 and authors of the book about it, so it starts with the book and is pretty technical, dives into some forth code, then it gets to the fun heat diffusions about here:

https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=531

Here's where I demonstrate some meta rules that let you paint which of 16 dithered heat diffusion rules to run per cell, that I use for storytelling, then an even weirder demo of painting with Ridiculous Instruction Set parallel cellular automata machine language with many different rules (not all diffusion, including life, brian's brain, 8 directional data moving "busses", and others):

https://youtu.be/LyLMHxRNuck?t=1398

Cool project! Some of the patterns you can create are insane...

Cool project and cool crt monitor

This is a very enjoyable read, what a great project!

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