KABOOOM by Guigui @ Context Free Art
I could easily sink a week of evenings playing around with Context Free Art. It’s a system for producing abstract art from ‘grammars’ – essentially simple recursive computer programs – and can produce some stunning images.
It reminds me a lot of the ImageBreeder project I started off a couple of years ago. The images weren’t nearly as refined as those from CFA but they came from a similarly generative process with the added bonus of an online generator.
The real feature of ImageBreeder was the breeding part which made the system instantly accessible to anyone who could express a preference with a mouse click. I’d love to try to connect these two systems together but I can’t see it happening soon, sadly.
EDIT: just noticed in the forum a JavaScript port of ContextFree that would make an online breeding extension much more feasible (and rather more elegant) if the speed and compatibility are non-issues.
Much obliged to Rag! for putting me on to all this.
29/03/2009 at 8:51 am Permalink
The kind of approach you are searching for was already tested in the “electric sheep” screensaver : http://electricsheep.org/
Its not web-based, but you have the sources…
29/03/2009 at 12:29 pm Permalink
I’m sure I stumbled across Electric Sheep before and it’s very impressive.
The idea behind ImageBreeder is a bit more personalised where an image is the product of a single breeder rather than a crowd vote. There’s also the potential for images to be branched off to form rich lineages.
The closest thing to ImageBreeder in this respect is the ongoing PicBreeder project. That uses a non-generative representation but otherwise continues the online evolutionary approach that ImageBreeder took.