[dorkbotdc-blabber] some blather about last nights dork

[Philip Kohn]

I really enjoyed last nights presentations.
Unfortunately I arrived too late to see the Data_Scape in action.
Pindar's talk really got me thinking about creativity.
I would really like to know more about how things like balance, and 
composition
are handled without randomness.
I really love the idea of seeing how far you can get without any random 
numbers.
I've always relied on some sort of random functions, even if they are 
carefully tuned and filtered,
but in a way it is really a cop out.

Most of the tools of artificial intelligence (neural nets, backprop, 
etc.) are designed to capture
regularities in the input/output transformation.
But I think art and creativity revolve around the interplay of 
expectations and surprises.
You have to have rules, but you also have to break them, and break them 
the right amount and
in the right contexts.
You need AI tools that can take a model of the regularities and figure 
out how to make these interesting
and strong exceptions.
The worst thing you can do as an artist is to create something that 
looks like a mistake.
(Although you can repeat that "mistake" and then it may become good art 
again!)
The exceptions need to stand out.

I have done some art evolution, using my own ratings as a fitness function.
In fact I became so obsessed with it that I was up all night rating 
thousands of images.
The best ones would get mutated to make the next batch, etc.
This was in 1998, and I can't find any of the images at this point :<
I really had to stop doing it because it was adversely effecting my life.


Here are some of the best links:

One of my heroes, Karl Sims (what a perfect name!).
http://www.karlsims.com/papers/siggraph91.html
http://www.karlsims.com/

Also check out his creatures that evolved in a simulated physical 
environment selected by their ability to walk, or swim or jump.
http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
It is amazing how "creative" some of these bots are in the way they move!
I'd love to evolve some more realistic bots that could actually be built.

General history of interactive evolution, art
http://www.asu.edu/cfa/art/people/faculty/collins/emergence/emergence.htm

An installation using interactive evolution to make abstract videos
http://www.xs4all.nl/~notnot/E-volverLUMC/E-volverLUMC.html


Didn't know about this one!  You can evolve some pretty interesting 
images in a collaborative online pool.
http://picbreeder.org/

Another image breeder that you can run on your own computer.
http://simons.intlab.soka.ac.jp/~unemi/sbart/



There is a big problem with all this.
When you have a lot of parameters, or knobs to twiddle, you need a 
minimum of twice that number of example datasets.
So if you really want to evolve each brush stroke, you will need a lot 
of user input.
Anything artistic is going to have zillions of parameters.  Maybe that 
is a big part of creativity is finding
your way around the space of possibilities without getting lost or 
overwhelmed!

One solution would be to evolve a "critic" that evaluates the results, 
and then let it work automatically.
I have some ideas about how to evolve the critic based on examples of 
good art that can be found easily on the web.

Blabber, blabber....