@themanual4am This is not a perfect model of morphogenesis. The resemblance lies in the idea that each cell has the same “instructions,” and it follows those instructions based on locally available context / signals to contribute part of a coherent whole, without a top-down “blueprint” to follow. But the virtual cells are not much like real cells, the virtual body isn’t much like a real body, and the process of evolution is replaced with gradient descent. There is no movement, there is no behavior beyond form, and there is no “external environment” except for the loss function.
Still, the image is the emergent product of many cells “behaving” autonomously according to a learned program. When the image produced by this system is “wrong,” the training process modifies the genetic “language” used to describe a target image and / or the way that language gets interpreted into cell behavior, such that the system as a whole is more likely to draw the right image in the future.