The original! (I believe)

There have been some cool / highly optimized implementations of this, now colloquially referred to as "particle life"

https://particle-life.com/

https://hunar4321.github.io/particle-life/

This is a popular project and fun to implement- just search for "particle life".

I also took a crack at this when playing with compute shaders in Godot, if you are interested in a very simple implementation.

Under the folder "Life" https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/compute-shaders

The project you linked to has this in the readme:

    This project was inspired by: Jeffery Ventrella’s Clusters http://www.ventrella.com/Clusters/

So it looks like this submission is the original.

He's saying this post is the original, and then pointing to some more projects inspired by it

Indeed - I see the ambiguity in the language I chose.

Yes I was trying to communicate, from my understanding, the main post here is the original work, but it has inspired a bunch of projects since then.

If you enjoy watching colorful balls fly around you may also enjoy:

https://www.zerok.com/demo/

This is a little toy model of what goes on inside our ion source, laser cooling + photoionization. I use it in talks sometimes. The colormap is red=hot, blue=cold, white=ions

Love it! I want more

I remember playing with the same author's other project Gene Pool a lot many years ago. It was fun seeing creatures evolve, survive and die.

https://www.swimbots.com/genepool/

Is there an overview of the rules of the game somewhere?

If you like particles, you may enjoy this generative art project I made last year: https://www.artblocks.io/project/424

If you hate particles, here's a generative thing I did

https://www.fleen.org/old_generative_art_projects/powerbox_4...

Damn, this is cool. It pretty quickly developed cells, the light blue particles acting as a cell wall for the red and blue ones.

Thank you, this is cool. It pretty quickly turned all the fans on my GPU to Max, and was quite ascetically pleasing.

> quite ascetically pleasing.

If you get your kicks from material deprivation, I suppose.

Great. There goes my productivity this morning.

Mine is gone too.

Self organization always impresses me.

Check out smoothlife. It's on YouTube somewhere.

In the notes the creator discusses abandoning the project because of the soul-consuming effects of working on it all the time. Word to the wise.

Looks a lot like how imagine atom nuclei to behave if really slowed down.

Has there ever been a successor to the particles + algorithmic music program Clusterworks? I used to spend hours just watching it and changing the movements and music with my mouse.

One I made some 10+ years ago: https://imbusy.org/files/circles.html

I wonder what would Langton's ant do on aperiodic hat monotile...

This is apparently related to Leap Motion. Whatever happened to that?

It was acquired by Ultraleap, that still sells the products. I don't how it performs against hand-tracking in camera nowadays.

Cool project.

I love gene pool, another program made by this guy.