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I am a huge fan of Sandspiel, which Max described in this article from 2019, and recently I was delighted to discover that he and TodePond have been doing a huge amount of wonderful work since then. What happens when you combine Sandspiel with a Scratch-like blocks based visual programming language that lets you look inside and see how rules work, tweak and modify them, and even define your own rules for different types of particles? And then form a community around it for sharing Here is Max's and TodePond's brilliantly ambitious visually programmable sequel, Sandspiel Studio! link Here's my profile, where you can play with the version of Max's flower growing rule that he shows here: link ...to grow underground potatoes and fancy flowers: link I've written more about Sandspeil Studio and related topics of artificial life, cellular automata, and visual programming, and quoted some interesting discussion with Max and TodePond from their Discord server (they actually already knew about most of this stuff, but they love it as much as I do), in the "Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?" discussion, in reply to api's comment about Digital Artificial Life: link api 67 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/pa... Digital Artificial Life -- as in evolving program ecosystems, artificial chemistries or cellular automata that can manifest life-like phenomena, etc. Haven't done much with it in a while but w