Why are the images always generated in the same orientation (upright)? Do the cells have awareness of what is "up"?

You can make the centipede grow longer, which makes sense given how this works. Or grow a 2nd centipede for extra points.

The abstract implies that strictly local updates are a hinderance to high res, however i would have thought there would be an interesting way to get speed up gains from neighbor-only traffic on GPUs CAM-style. am i making that up?

Really interesting demo, nicely done :) Would be fun if switching the "Target Image" when using the second brush mode in the Growing Demo didn't erase/reset the existing canvas, so we could "stamp" new things on top of other images. Small thing perhaps but I got sad when it disappeared when I wanted to merge a kitten on top of the chameleon but couldn't :(

The automata just completely destroys the image if I draw too much over the stabilized image with the brush. 5 horizontal swipes are enough to destroy the kitty, is that to be expected?

EDIT: video here: https://imgur.com/a/ItZGd5X

So the goal is to evaporate it with minimum number of shots?