Very interesting. Puts me in mind of an old technology that seems to have fallen out of favor. I’m referring to fiber optics: a kind of pixel-by-proxy scheme where light is piped along separate strands of transparent material. The resolution of a resulting image is limited by the number of strands. Succumbed to the mini-cam.

Seek an attitude of monkish anticipation, and some monkish libation and you may be visited by a fragment of the pink elephant – preferably Seussical.

The program allows you to set a maximum rate of mutation for each generation, and then to allow the R and G and B values, of each pixel, to randomly vary by a percentage of that rate. Each of the component colors is given a slightly different limit, so a uniform gray field never occurs.

Like…Max. Mutation rate for each generation = .05
Max Mutation rate for R = .50 of .05
Max Mutation rate for G = .48 of .05
Max Mutation rate for B = .52 of .05

The resulting image will be biased toward Blue Violet. The mutations are random, within these limits. I don’t know why Adam chose these particular rates.

A fragment of the Mona Lisa, or Dogs Playing Poker, has not yet appeared.

I enjoyed running small quick tests…20 X 30 tiles to get quick results. I’d wanted to run some big ones over weeks…like 240X320, which could be displayed on small screens with every tile a pixel…for extremely smooth transitions. But for some reason my MacPro would randomly crash within a few hundred generations, and we didn’t have the time or inclination to track down the problem. Adam runs them with no problem on both his mac and on Unix servers.

I have an inkling that they may have some relevance beyond being pretty patterns.

I’ve fooled a bit with programming an Arduino board to control a RGB led, and it can run the led thru the whole palette of RGB values.A crazy idea from this would be to hand build an array of RGB leds, essentially a small monitor, and connect them to a grid of sensors on the film plane of an old view camera….it could be medieval, perhaps gothic, video. Focus the camera on odd subjects on sunny days….

This idea…which I totally lack the time or inclination to pursue, is related to work Jim Campbell does with lo res hand built monitors of monochrome leds.
http://www.jimcampbell.tv/

For whatever it’s worth, I Googled “Utter Batshit Insanity” to find that the appellation tends to dwell almost exclusively on Wolfram. Would that we all enjoyed such attention.

Your mutating examples are colorful and not at all what I would imagine a uniformity tropism to produce. In fact, it would seem that things should go all RGB gray – even with the resetting mechanism.

Steve:

There could be a payoff: a recognizable change could trigger a chalupa giveaway at Taco Bell, or absolution for sins of omission committed during times of programmatic uniformity. Things wouldn’t have to be all that monkish as the curious might drop by. But credibility in the eyes of one’s fellows would depend upon resolute adherence to the screen.

A hoop and a holler perhaps?

As it is currently set up each pixel, or tile, looks at all it’s immediate neighbors, and mutates toward uniformity…being numerically more similar in it’s RGB values to it’s neighbors.
Adam and I have discussed ways of encouraging development of shapes…having the pixels respond and mutate toward their neighbors in specific directions…toward the north neighbor, or the southeast…and have randomly selected areas with different direction biases. If it happens I’ll let you know. My grasp of the mechanics is a bit vague!

The “aesthetic” or “organizing” function is very simple so far…simply rewarding greater color uniformity. Differences are made by slight adjustments of the rates of mutation allowed for R or G or B. The program is also written so that when a ‘plateau’ is reached….several generations run with no improvement, the program backs off to an earlier state and restarts there, seeking a more ‘fertile’ path.

I think they are interesting ways to think about evolving structures,and may be able to answer some empirical questions…but their relation to my sense of the nature of art is very tenous.

Nice move, if I understand correctly: the meditative happening becomes the art. You should be a basketball player or a politician. Naturally, I don’t denigrate the art in creating an interesting simulation, nor of course the science. It’s just not what I want to do at the moment.

Bruce,

For the most part, the devil is in the details of your (or Adam’s) “aesthetic” function. To get shapes (implying edges), you may need edge-related criteria, such as that smooth edges are good–a sort of surface tension. The competition between edge and area contributions to overall goodness can play out in very intriguing ways. You could also make the 2-D space anisotropic: up-down interactions are different from sideways ones. Endless possibilities…

The book review you cited was great. Rather technical, but very plausible and well-argued.

Borges wrote the short piece in 1940…so he was thinking of paper and ink. But in addition to size the problem of computation time, to generate the library, is also huge…every possible book would include Moby Dick, and Moby Dick with one letter in the wrong place…ad infinitum. Likewise a ‘Gallery’ of Babel, with all possible pictures, would have “Guernica” in a cormplete version, and a version with one pixel misplaced, and a version interrupted with 1/2 of Velazquez’ “Las Meninas”, etc……

I found an amusing review of Wolfram’s book;

A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity

see: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

I’m very happy with seeing such a number of compulsions here; I’m sure I have a rare and accelerated case of AADDD.

You know, it does sound potentially trivial as a form of permutations to nowhere. But Wolfram cites examples of progressions of sameness that go on seemingly forever, only to produce a change. Granted the change itself can be as trivial as it is surprising. But inferred is the chance that the change may be significant to somebody. The art in it would be meditative as a screen in a quiet setting, and in company with individuals assuming a sort of anticipatory monkhood, would present a cellular automation as it progresses An alteration in the routine would be non-trivial for its very happening.

A New Kind Of Science it is, and we know so at Wolfram’s tediously repeated insistence. Doorstop that it is, it could make a very small but comfortable sofa for all of its padding. Kidding aside, a Wolfram for Dummies would do me a lot of good.

Bruce:

As you are finding out, there are a number of compulsions on display here. So here’s one: would Babel’s library be so large as a collection of bound volumes, or as information stored, say, on microchips?