The 36 Points linked in the article is very fascinating https://www.sagejenson.com/36points/#22_transmission_tower

Press numbers and letters on this page to switch to one of the variations.

I did something very similar some years ago while learning metal [1], I recall them being called "boids". I spent days just playing with the various parameters, luckily my implementation was not as pretty as the one offered in the OP, otherwise I would have lost weeks instead.

[1] https://github.com/ghyatzo/metalplay?tab=readme-ov-file

The same author has a great series of tutorials for making looping animations, where the animation appears longer than the length of the loop. It also introduces Perlin noise, which I've found quite useful in a few unrelated projects.

https://bleuje.com/tutorials/

Here is an example of a 10-minute movie in a 6.3-second looping GIF. https://bsky.app/profile/johsenevoldsen.bsky.social/post/3lm...

Very nice. It seems some of the algorithms are (inadvertently?) solving the shallow water equations. Looks similar to the results I was getting working on https://github.com/Ono-Sendai/terraingen

Reminds me of Electric Sheep

https://electricsheep.org/

Reminds me of the Gray-Scott explorer [0], implemented with WebGL (in 2012!!).

Mathematics is beautiful!

[0] https://www.mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/ogl/index.html

Absolutely beautiful visualizations.

These are way beyond anything I've done, but you can actually do these with compute shaders in real time and they look quite good.

I played with using Godot to do this kind of slime simulation (inspired by Sebastian Lague) when they released compute shaders: https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/compute-shaders?tab=readme-o....

Edit:

Here's a good webgpu demo (not by me) of this kind of simulation https://shridhar2602.github.io/WebGPU-Slime-Simulation/

This is something that Daniel Shiffman from coding train would consider for the coding challenges