6 ms·

On generative algorithms

479 points by dave9000 8y ago

shawn 8y ago
Davinci pointed out that a tree’s thickness is constant if you slice it in a semi circle. https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/leonardotree1.jpg https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/leonardotree1.jpg That is, if you face a tree and draw a circle with your arm, and add up all the thicknesses your fingers intersect, the total will always be the same. https://www.insidescience.org/news/uncovering-da-vincis-rule-trees https://www.insidescience.org/news/uncovering-da-vincis-rule...
- sampo 8y ago
  In forestry, they teach that as "pipe model". I am unable to track down how long that observation has been known in forestry, but I found this 1964 paper that attempts to build on the observation (already known in 1964) and build a theory. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370362 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370362 The modern understanding is that the pipe model holds only approximately.
  - sampo 8y ago
    It's kinda nice, how you can take a bunch of metal wires to make a tree trunk, and start separating them and folding them into branches, and separating and folding into smaller branches, and this can give pretty realistic looking trees. https://diyjoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/WireTree.jpg https://diyjoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/WireTree.jpg https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/10/dense-wire-tree-sculptures-by-clive-maddison/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/10/dense-wire-tree-sculp... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0tj_ZLpv80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0tj_ZLpv80
- icc97 8y ago
  That second link you gave puts it very well: > In other words, if a tree’s branches were folded upward and squeezed together, the tree would look like one big trunk with the same thickness from top to bottom. Absolutely fascinating!
aw3c2 8y ago
Warning, this series of fantastically written articles on generative art might make you feel very small and sad compared to those who are capable of not only creating but communicating beauty like this. In other words, I highly recommend you try some generative art yourself and see that at its core, it is not that hard and YOU can do it too!
- shawn 8y ago
  Hmm, no need to feel like that. There are so many wonderful things in the world. Creativity is additive — even if you only do something small, it still matters.
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    > Creativity is additive — even if you only do something small, it still matters. This is a wonderful quote, which I'll probably steal. (Is it original to you?) Thank you!
    - toxik 8y ago
      Creativity is additive as far as money's not involved.
- tbirrell 8y ago
  Do you have any recommendations of where to start?
  - samfriedman 8y ago
    Processing is very popular and easy to pick up for generative art. This youtube channel has some great tutorials and walkthroughs on creating various things with it: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw Beyond the basics, it's also quite useful to pick out a piece of art or an effect you like and attempt to recreate it. You'll learn a lot of tricks very quickly that way.
akshayB 8y ago
One of the reasons why I like to follow generative algorithms its extremely unique and wildly diverse at the same time. It is a combination of geometry, design, art & programming that tries to mimic nature.
make3 8y ago
Everyone who liked this should like to read on Generative Adversarial (Neural) Networks, generative models where a pair of neural networks are trained one against the other to learn to generate new images. This has been put to many great purposes, including artistic ones: https://towardsdatascience.com/gangogh-creating-art-with-gans-8d087d8f74a1 https://towardsdatascience.com/gangogh-creating-art-with-gan...
- weego 8y ago
  No it's a completely different interest and skillet. Not everything can be boiled down to "datascience can fix it!". Especially when all those NNs will just generate art that's a mashup of the training data and won't have any real inspiration. Unexpected results is not inspiration.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - yorwba 8y ago
    Using GANs for art is not necessarily limited to training on a collection of famous artists to replicate their style. Some artists use them as another tool to process and transform their artwork https://thegradient.pub/playing-a-game-of-ganstruction/ https://thegradient.pub/playing-a-game-of-ganstruction/ I'm pretty sure that the invention of photography was also greeted with complaints that it lacked "real inspiration" because a photographer "just" had to choose what to take a picture of. But the real inspiration is always in what you choose your art to be, and not whether you create it by applying paint to a canvas.
olooney 8y ago
These are very beautiful. Very organic, yet strictly mathematical. Many of these techniques have practical applications in computer graphics; see for example https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz/videos
khitchdee 8y ago
There's but a fine line between generative algorithms used for the purposes of arts and entertainment and those used for programming itself. Formerly referred to as meta-programming generative programming is the art of writing programs that help generate programs sort of a way of extending the idea of the tool as in programming tool beyond its current rather static avatar that consists merely of a rather lifeless IDE
- a1369209993 8y ago
  Honestly, given the unreasonable effectiveness of (de-)compression algorithms, and the plethora of "I built a CPU in [insert PCG game here]" articles, I think it's a line of negative width.
  - khitchdee 8y ago
    strange
sarbaz 8y ago
The Hyphae image (and the trees) have a result that's very similar to Diffusion Limited Aggregation, but the method of generation is very different. IMO the Hyphae way is actually less cool than plain DLA. The algorithm had a lot of degrees of freedom that were selected randomly, while DLA has very few degrees of freedom and gives a cooler shape I guess the point is that sometimes a simpler algorithm can give more interesting results for this kind of thing
- kragen 8y ago
  DLA is super awesome, but if you're starting from a point, it takes a lot of computation. Or, rather, what we thought of as a lot of computation around 1990. Hoff's version of "Hyphae" is orders of magnitude less computationally demanding. In a lot of cases, if you're willing to throw a massive amount of computation at a morphogenetic problem, you can get a higher coolness-to-algorithmic-complexity ratio.
joshu 8y ago
He does a great job of explaining stuff that seems very hard in a way that is intuitively very implementable. I've been a fan of his for years and have ported some of his stuff to my own robots...
wiz21c 8y ago
The father of all of this is William Latham. https://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/ https://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/ (or John Conway, but that's another league)
- hapticdata 8y ago
  Hard to define a beginning but "The Algorists" such as Roman Verostko, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr are probably a better reference for a starting point http://www.verostko.com/algorist.html http://www.verostko.com/algorist.html Or possibly Lillian Schwartz's work at Bell Labs http://lillian.com/ http://lillian.com/
- sampo 8y ago
  Lindenmayer (born 1925) and Prusinkiewicz (born 1952) are older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristid_Lindenmayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristid_Lindenmayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przemys%C5%82aw_Prusinkiewicz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przemys%C5%82aw_Prusinkiewicz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algorithmic_Beauty_of_Plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algorithmic_Beauty_of_Plan...
thx4allthestuff 8y ago
@Anders Hoff, thank you for making your site work just fine with javascript disabled. I really appreciate that.
jimijazz 8y ago
Awesome work! Any one knows why did the author closed the shop?
jimijazz 8y ago
I wonder if these algorithms have been applied to sound generation....
pareshverma91 8y ago
About half a decade ago I had added a random blot generation to my now-unmaintained-site https://web.iiit.ac.in/~paresh.verma/ https://web.iiit.ac.in/~paresh.verma/. I have spent a few hours generating random blots, and trying to interpret them. Adding more structure to it, with an algorithm should make it more interesting and entertaining.
akavel 8y ago
When I was a kid (in the 90s), one of the computer periodicals in Poland at the time had a column titled "Mikroprofesor", which run a lot of simple and beutiful algorithms for generative art like these. I loved the images and even tried coding some of them (I think they always came with some pseudocode). I wish there was some online archive of the articles, but unfortunately I couldn't find one (the magazine was named "Enter"; I can't recall the name of the column author however).
- fractallyte 8y ago
  A.K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations" column in Scientific American in the 1980s also had early examples of algorithmic art - I bet you'd have loved those!
- emptybits 8y ago
  Sounds interesting. FWIW, A search for "Magazyn Enter" (the publisher is Lupus?) at archive.org turns up a handful of downloadable cover CDs from 1999. I didn't see any references to Mikroprofesor in the one ISO I checked. Just FYI, if it helps anyone sleuth.
speps 8y ago
I was fascinated by Jared Tarbell's work and his website some time ago: http://www.complexification.net/gallery/ http://www.complexification.net/gallery/

479 points by dave9000 8y ago

Davinci pointed out that a tree’s thickness is constant if you slice it in a semi circle. https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/leonardotree1.jpg https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/leonardotree1.jpg That is, if you face a tree and draw a circle with your arm, and add up all the thicknesses your fingers intersect, the total will always be the same. https://www.insidescience.org/news/uncovering-da-vincis-rule-trees https://www.insidescience.org/news/uncovering-da-vincis-rule...

sampo 8y ago
In forestry, they teach that as "pipe model". I am unable to track down how long that observation has been known in forestry, but I found this 1964 paper that attempts to build on the observation (already known in 1964) and build a theory. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370362 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370362 The modern understanding is that the pipe model holds only approximately.
- sampo 8y ago
  It's kinda nice, how you can take a bunch of metal wires to make a tree trunk, and start separating them and folding them into branches, and separating and folding into smaller branches, and this can give pretty realistic looking trees. https://diyjoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/WireTree.jpg https://diyjoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/WireTree.jpg https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/10/dense-wire-tree-sculptures-by-clive-maddison/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/10/dense-wire-tree-sculp... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0tj_ZLpv80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0tj_ZLpv80
icc97 8y ago
That second link you gave puts it very well: > In other words, if a tree’s branches were folded upward and squeezed together, the tree would look like one big trunk with the same thickness from top to bottom. Absolutely fascinating!

aw3c2 8y ago

Warning, this series of fantastically written articles on generative art might make you feel very small and sad compared to those who are capable of not only creating but communicating beauty like this. In other words, I highly recommend you try some generative art yourself and see that at its core, it is not that hard and YOU can do it too!

shawn 8y ago
Hmm, no need to feel like that. There are so many wonderful things in the world. Creativity is additive — even if you only do something small, it still matters.
- JadeNB 8y ago
  > Creativity is additive — even if you only do something small, it still matters. This is a wonderful quote, which I'll probably steal. (Is it original to you?) Thank you!
  - toxik 8y ago
    Creativity is additive as far as money's not involved.
tbirrell 8y ago
Do you have any recommendations of where to start?
- samfriedman 8y ago
  Processing is very popular and easy to pick up for generative art. This youtube channel has some great tutorials and walkthroughs on creating various things with it: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw Beyond the basics, it's also quite useful to pick out a piece of art or an effect you like and attempt to recreate it. You'll learn a lot of tricks very quickly that way.

akshayB 8y ago

One of the reasons why I like to follow generative algorithms its extremely unique and wildly diverse at the same time. It is a combination of geometry, design, art & programming that tries to mimic nature.

make3 8y ago

Everyone who liked this should like to read on Generative Adversarial (Neural) Networks, generative models where a pair of neural networks are trained one against the other to learn to generate new images. This has been put to many great purposes, including artistic ones: https://towardsdatascience.com/gangogh-creating-art-with-gans-8d087d8f74a1 https://towardsdatascience.com/gangogh-creating-art-with-gan...

weego 8y ago
No it's a completely different interest and skillet. Not everything can be boiled down to "datascience can fix it!". Especially when all those NNs will just generate art that's a mashup of the training data and won't have any real inspiration. Unexpected results is not inspiration.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- yorwba 8y ago
  Using GANs for art is not necessarily limited to training on a collection of famous artists to replicate their style. Some artists use them as another tool to process and transform their artwork https://thegradient.pub/playing-a-game-of-ganstruction/ https://thegradient.pub/playing-a-game-of-ganstruction/ I'm pretty sure that the invention of photography was also greeted with complaints that it lacked "real inspiration" because a photographer "just" had to choose what to take a picture of. But the real inspiration is always in what you choose your art to be, and not whether you create it by applying paint to a canvas.

olooney 8y ago

These are very beautiful. Very organic, yet strictly mathematical. Many of these techniques have practical applications in computer graphics; see for example https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz/videos

khitchdee 8y ago

There's but a fine line between generative algorithms used for the purposes of arts and entertainment and those used for programming itself. Formerly referred to as meta-programming generative programming is the art of writing programs that help generate programs sort of a way of extending the idea of the tool as in programming tool beyond its current rather static avatar that consists merely of a rather lifeless IDE

a1369209993 8y ago
Honestly, given the unreasonable effectiveness of (de-)compression algorithms, and the plethora of "I built a CPU in [insert PCG game here]" articles, I think it's a line of negative width.
- khitchdee 8y ago
  strange

sarbaz 8y ago

The Hyphae image (and the trees) have a result that's very similar to Diffusion Limited Aggregation, but the method of generation is very different. IMO the Hyphae way is actually less cool than plain DLA. The algorithm had a lot of degrees of freedom that were selected randomly, while DLA has very few degrees of freedom and gives a cooler shape I guess the point is that sometimes a simpler algorithm can give more interesting results for this kind of thing

kragen 8y ago
DLA is super awesome, but if you're starting from a point, it takes a lot of computation. Or, rather, what we thought of as a lot of computation around 1990. Hoff's version of "Hyphae" is orders of magnitude less computationally demanding. In a lot of cases, if you're willing to throw a massive amount of computation at a morphogenetic problem, you can get a higher coolness-to-algorithmic-complexity ratio.

joshu 8y ago

He does a great job of explaining stuff that seems very hard in a way that is intuitively very implementable. I've been a fan of his for years and have ported some of his stuff to my own robots...

wiz21c 8y ago

The father of all of this is William Latham. https://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/ https://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/ (or John Conway, but that's another league)

hapticdata 8y ago
Hard to define a beginning but "The Algorists" such as Roman Verostko, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr are probably a better reference for a starting point http://www.verostko.com/algorist.html http://www.verostko.com/algorist.html Or possibly Lillian Schwartz's work at Bell Labs http://lillian.com/ http://lillian.com/
sampo 8y ago
Lindenmayer (born 1925) and Prusinkiewicz (born 1952) are older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristid_Lindenmayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristid_Lindenmayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przemys%C5%82aw_Prusinkiewicz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przemys%C5%82aw_Prusinkiewicz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algorithmic_Beauty_of_Plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algorithmic_Beauty_of_Plan...

thx4allthestuff 8y ago

@Anders Hoff, thank you for making your site work just fine with javascript disabled. I really appreciate that.

jimijazz 8y ago

Awesome work! Any one knows why did the author closed the shop?

jimijazz 8y ago

I wonder if these algorithms have been applied to sound generation....

pareshverma91 8y ago

About half a decade ago I had added a random blot generation to my now-unmaintained-site https://web.iiit.ac.in/~paresh.verma/ https://web.iiit.ac.in/~paresh.verma/. I have spent a few hours generating random blots, and trying to interpret them. Adding more structure to it, with an algorithm should make it more interesting and entertaining.

akavel 8y ago

When I was a kid (in the 90s), one of the computer periodicals in Poland at the time had a column titled "Mikroprofesor", which run a lot of simple and beutiful algorithms for generative art like these. I loved the images and even tried coding some of them (I think they always came with some pseudocode). I wish there was some online archive of the articles, but unfortunately I couldn't find one (the magazine was named "Enter"; I can't recall the name of the column author however).

fractallyte 8y ago
A.K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations" column in Scientific American in the 1980s also had early examples of algorithmic art - I bet you'd have loved those!
emptybits 8y ago
Sounds interesting. FWIW, A search for "Magazyn Enter" (the publisher is Lupus?) at archive.org turns up a handful of downloadable cover CDs from 1999. I didn't see any references to Mikroprofesor in the one ISO I checked. Just FYI, if it helps anyone sleuth.

speps 8y ago

I was fascinated by Jared Tarbell's work and his website some time ago: http://www.complexification.net/gallery/ http://www.complexification.net/gallery/