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Graphics Software GUI KDE PHP Programming

Ming + PHP5 + AI = Pretty 204

Posted by timothy from the mind-the-drooling dept.
cyberscribe writes "Project K++ just released its first alpha version today. The project aims to explore computer-generated abstract art using PHP and Ming. The name of the project is an homage to Wassily Kandinsky, father of abstract art. Caution: the Flash movies can be intensive on your graphics card. Other caution: hitting reload to see the next cool computer-generated abstract 'painting' can be highly addictive."
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Ming + PHP5 + AI = Pretty More

Ming + PHP5 + AI = Pretty

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  • Nice warning. (Score:3, Funny)

    by General Sherman ( 614373 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:53AM (#9374657) Journal
    Other other caution: Hitting reload may cause the site to go down faster. Imagine that. Medic!

    • Nice Disclaimer (Score:4, Funny)

      by Propaganda13 ( 312548 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @04:11AM (#9374919)
      DISCLAIMER: This software is graphics-intensive. The author is not responsible if viewing these Flash movies causes your web browser or computer to crash. It's not my fault if your video card can't handle it. :-) /. reply: It's not my fault if your server can't handle it. :-)

  • Poor Abstract Artists (Score:5, Funny)

    by BlueCup ( 753410 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:53AM (#9374660) Homepage Journal
    Looks like their careers are over =(

    • Stolen from MINIX (Score:5, Funny)

      by muyuubyou ( 621373 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @04:30AM (#9374970)
      These guys couldn't have possibly coded that in a question of months. This means they must have stolen it from Minix. I think I'm going to write a book about it. I'm so smart.

    • Re:Poor Abstract Artists (Score:4, Insightful)

      by linzeal ( 197905 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @05:22AM (#9375099) Journal
      Abstract was always the lowest common denominator. Look at some real Abstract Art [ebsqart.com] and compare, the lowly generated stuff to me is no better than a winamp visualization. Sure it can pump out as much visual stimuli as you will allow but what does any of it mean? Abstraction of thought still requires recognition of said thought in the first place or it is mere bullshit or automated bullshit. The human element in art is far from gone, computer generated music and visual arts have always fallen short imho.

      • Re:Poor Abstract Artists (Score:4, Insightful)

        by pbhj ( 607776 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @08:26AM (#9375731) Homepage Journal
        But the impact of post-modernist thought on the art world has made it such that it's no longer important what the initial thought was ... now the viewer decides, with post-modernism there is no objective concept. So, to spell it out ... it doesn't matter what the artists concept is so long as the viewer perceives that there is one!

        Of course there's a case for us having entered post-post-modernism but it's not clear on the complexion of that value system yet, IMHO.

        PS: I'm an objectivist personally, I believe in objective truth, lot's of people don't appear to though.

  • What? (Score:4, Funny)

    by hfis ( 624045 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:54AM (#9374662)
    "Other caution: hitting reload to see the next cool computer-generated abstract 'painting' can be highly addictive."

    Does the person who submitted this have something personal against the owners of the site or something? I hope they know where to send the bill after their server has been reduced to a useless pile of molten plastic.

    • Re:What? (Score:2, Informative)

      by rebeka thomas ( 673264 )
      I hope they know where to send the bill after their server has been reduced to a useless pile of molten plastic.

      Common misconception, but a complete myth. A slashdotting has no more chance of melting or burning a server than does ping flooding it. The worst that can happen is a server side crash caused by misconfiguration, and that won't damage the hardware.
    • Actually, his server is handling it quite well...

  • Needs more (Score:4, Funny)

    by aePrime ( 469226 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:54AM (#9374664)
    If only somebody would generate background midi music!

    Just kidding, it's pretty interesting.

  • art? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by incal ( 728144 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:54AM (#9374665)
    Art isn't about being pretty. Art is about emotional, spiritual communication between an artist, his culture, work of art, and public.

    some random images are no more art than some randomly placed things on my workbench.

    • Re:art? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I always thought art made you question some aspect of the world around you. I guess this raises the question "who is the artist?".

      Saying you do not think it is art does not mean it is not art, it just means that you in particular cannot find a way to connect to the images. I'm sure other people could (my mother, for example, was at one point very into Howard Hodgkin, a painter who uses apparently random strokes - I couldn't see what she was on about, but I would still classify those paintings as art).

      Matt

      • Re:art? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AllenChristopher ( 679129 )
        The issue is not whether I think it is art. The issue is whether the computer thinks it is art. The computer does not think it is art because the computer does not think anything, not yet.

        See Daniel Dennett and the intentional stance... Art is always intentional. Even if you just drop your ketchup by accident then think it is pretty and photograph it for the wall, you're still accomplishing intention after having made the pattern. You're intending it to be something.

        This is why not every shit you take o

    • Re:art? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xiph ( 723935 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:01AM (#9374693)
      however, the work of programmers who created it could be considered art, the big difference from a painting is that this art is interactive.
      the work isn't just the one image, it's the whole thing.

      Remember that the algorithms that makes it have been created by someone, and probably tweaked a bit too.
      all this tweaking and coding is not that much different to molding a shape out of clay.

      • Re:art? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by incal ( 728144 )
        but we are exposed not to beauty of their code, but some - in my eyes - random graphical effects. you're just expanding concept of the art to level, where anything goes.

        I know, its quite stylish today, postmodernism... but I prefer here to be conservatist. :)

        • Re:art? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by vidarh ( 309115 )
          No, we are being exposed to the outcome of a process. That outcome is a program whose visual representation is a (near infinite) series of animation. The process is the writing of the program.

          How is this different from a painting, where the visual representation is more static, yes, but is still influenced by the views and state of mind of the audience at the time, the light conditions, context in society (a painting of the WTC shown before and after 9/11 would likely evoke very different reactions, for i

      • Re:art? (Score:3, Informative)

        by alex_tibbles ( 754541 )
        You might want to look at Harold Cohen [ucsd.edu], the author of AARON. You might also be interested in a talk he did after retiring at the Tate (real format) [tate.org.uk]. I don't think that it's entirely clear whether the paintings are the work, or the program is the work.
        AARON however, was capable of creating representation images, which requires AI work in of itself. I am not sure (without perusing the code) much K++ is intelligent.

    • Re:art? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Some people claim that artists do random things, and that computers can do art.

      The real way to find out is to do some kind of "turing test" for art.

      • Re:art? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Rick the Red ( 307103 ) <Rick.The.Red@nOsPaM.gmail.com> on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @04:33AM (#9374979) Journal
        OK, but who's the judge of the "Turing test"? As in the "real" Turing test, I see a great bias in the premise that a human must judge whether some entitiy on the other side of the curtain is a computer or a human. Computers are far more objective than humans, so computers should be used to judge a "Turing test." What I consider witty conversation may be mindless blather to you, and visa-versa, so the only "Turing test" that I will find valid is the one I personally judge.* Naturally, you would also have to be a judge to accept the verdict, as would everyone else.

        I see no great leap to conclude that, similarly, a "Turing test" for art would be biased and thus worthless if it solely had human judges. Art to me may be junk to you, and visa-versa.**

        So any "Turing test" for art would quickly degenerate into something like David Letterman's bit, "Is This Anything?" And if you've seen that, you'll know how pointless this whole discussion really is.

        * Of course, any computer that passed the Turing test would be just as biased at judging it as any human, which in a way proves my point -- only I can judge a Turing test to my own satisfaction.

        ** Naturally, if a computer were capable of judging a "Turing test" for art, a computer would be capable of creating that art, thus mooting the entire discussion.

        • Naturally, if a computer were capable of judging a "Turing test" for art, a computer would be capable of creating that art

          Why? That certainly doesn't hold true for human Art Competition judges.

          (And on a more serious note, a computer neural network can be trained to recognize certain patterns without having to "know" anything about how to create those patterns. E.g. a face recognition program doesn't have to know how to make faces. Although it would be really cool if it did, and made scowls at the ugly

    • Re:art? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by daveb ( 4522 )
      Art isn't about being pretty.

      Yes it is

      Art is about emotional, spiritual communication between an artist, his culture, work of art, and public.

      you almost defined "pretty" there (in a pretentious "arty" way) - but that last cavet ... I guess there are no public art collections them. Stopping it being public removes the "art" from the work eh

      >some random images are no more art than some >randomly placed things on my workbench.

      sounds like an idea for my next installation. I'm not sure why

      • Re:art? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Too Much Noise ( 755847 )
        you need to reparse that:

        spiritual communication between an artist [...] and [the] public

        it's public==audience (noun).

        Anyway, I would have to side (partly) with the GP. Beauty is in the eye that beholds it. And thus art has to convey a message to its viewers. However, not everything that conveys a message is art - and the distinction is highly subjective. But the intent to convey a message from the creator is almost always a prerequisite.

        Bottom-line: art sense is mostly acquired through education, as
        • not everything that conveys a message is art - and the distinction is highly subjective
          Don't forget context. A traffic sign out by the side of the road is mearly conveying a message, while that same traffic sign hanging in a gallery (or your livingroom) is art.

        • Re:art? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by daveb ( 4522 )
          And no, art does not have to be 'pretty'. In fact, most of the stuff that endures is beautiful, not pretty. There's a distinction, you know.

          No - I don't know. Or rather "so you say". Beautiful, pretty, elegant, stunning ... start defining them, try locking them in a box and you start having problems. They are not tightly defined quantifiable essences.

          For something to be "art" it must be able to be appreciated ... it mustbe pretty to somone in some way

          "Pretty" != "meaningless fluff" but is simply a stat

          • "Pretty" != "meaningless fluff"

            Agreed. But how do you distinguish between being "pretty" and "beautiful"? You're right (and I didn't contest that) when saying these attributes are subjective. For me, "pretty" means that there's some (important) level where I don't 'connect' - if I did, it would be "beautiful".And since art is about connecting ... Of course, YMMV - so I apologize for making that statement too definite. De gustibus non disputandum. ^_^

    • Re:art? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by prockcore ( 543967 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:04AM (#9374710)
      Art isn't about being pretty. Art is about emotional, spiritual communication between an artist, his culture, work of art, and public.

      And you're saying this isn't? The artist is the programmer. His communication is the flash and how you interact with it.
      • If this IS art it's pretty bad. You should have seen http://www.levitated.net/ [levitated.net] (I think they are gone now though)Now THAT was an experiment in random and interactive images. The only thing interesting about this is that the guy used Ming but what he produced looks so bad it's really hard to be impressed.

    • Re:art? (Score:4, Funny)

      by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:11AM (#9374740)
      Then why is it when I go to a museum some random images are passed of as art?

    • Re:art? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by malfunct ( 120790 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:28AM (#9374802) Homepage
      Unless I'm totally missing something I had a program that did the exact same thing on my TRS-80 coco 2, nothing I'd consider amazing.

      If someone could explain what makes this so groundbreaking maybe I'd have a better appreciation of it.

      • Re:art? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Rick the Red ( 307103 )
        Apparantly, it's the fact that it's done with PHP. I guess PHP is considered incapable of doing this, and thus getting PHP to do it amazes some folk. I'm not familiar enought with PHP to be either amazed or underwhelmed by this announcement, but I do find it amusing, and I haven't even RTFA!
        • Ming allows PHP to dynamically create shockwave flash movies (swf) either from randomised data or from "real" data. This is just something quite new being used in an interesting way ... /.-ers get off [not literally I don't think] on this kind of thing.

          You lose geek points for that post I think.

          The ming webpages are worth a look. How about a site-meter that shows the number of visitors on site at present as individual beating hearts in a flash movie ... cool!?

          If you can do it in figures for PHP you can n
        • If you've ever worked with PHP, you realize how amazing it is to do anything other than parse simple web forms & query a database. Kinda like how it's impressive when somebody writes a Perl script over 100 lines that's readable.
    • Art is about accomplishing whatever the artist wants to accomplish.
    • Ah, yes the classic "My eight year old could do that" attack on art.

      You could write treatises on what is art, and some have, in the end art is what you make of it.
    • Art on my workbench is Art as far as I am concerned, if my viewing of it in an art context tells me it is art then it is art. Havent you ever looked at a view and said to yourself "that would make a great picture?". There are plenty of reasons why your chosen image would make a great picture even if its only to say "this captures the essence of a place and I want to take it away with me" Just because its not important art to the ongoing evolution of art history does not negate it as art.

      We are all artists.
    • " Art isn't about being pretty. "

      How this got modded up to +5 Interesting is beyond me. Who are you to determine what art is and isn't about? Art is by nature subjective. I find lots of art to be about "being pretty". What's so wrong with that anyways?

      So to recap: Art is about whatever the artist and audience want it to be about.

    • some random images are no more art than

      really? when was the last time you went to a contemporary art gallery? (bearing in mind that "modern art" had already finished by the 60s) the kind of art that has been made in the last year, kinda stuff.

      it might once have been about that, and it would even sort a lot of things out in my mind if it at least had the rationality of having "emotion" or "thought" behind it... but nowadays, a large majority of artists do things simply for the point of it being "aesthetic"

    • A lot of "art" today can best be described by a 4-letter word which starts with "f" and ends with "art".

      At our local gallery, proudly displayed, is a canvas painted (get this) all orange. Nothing else: just a large canvas painted orange. Now, someone please tell me what "emotional, spiritual communication" this 'artist' is conveying.

      There's another piece of "art" at our local gallery, which is a plain white canvas. It is by a Russian artist from 1918 (or so), titled "starting over" (or "clean slate" or

    • when is it going to be ported to xscreensaver?

    • this brings to mind a story my shop teacher told in class in grade 8 or so. he wasn't a fan of abstract art at the time (preferring more concrete art, i suppose), so to prove a point, he decided to submit a piece of his own "art" to a local gallery to see what would happen.

      so he went out to his workshed and took out his very old, battered, stained and paint-covered work table. from all outward appearances, the thing was pretty much just a random mess of nicks from saw blades, holes from misjudged nails and
      • this might just be a talltale that the teacher told to entertain the class,

        That's a popular urban legend... simple man impresses a modern-art crowd with his crude painting (either random splotches or a solid color). Variations of the concept have been used in TV shows like All In The Family [allinthefamilysit.com] and Commish [imdb.com].

        The idea may be taken from the Ern Malley [ernmalley.com] affair...

  • Desktop Wallpaper (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wolrahnaes ( 632574 ) <seanNO@SPAMseanharlow.info> on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:56AM (#9374670) Homepage Journal
    this could be reall sweet on platforms supporting using a web page as a wallpaper

    • Re:Desktop Wallpaper (Score:3, Informative)

      by spectral ( 158121 )
      One thing I miss from windows is drempels [geisswerks.com]. It's not abstract art like this, but just weird swirly patterns and stuff. You can set it to handle any overlay color, so for a while I had the backgrounds of a lot of windows set to rgb(1,1,1), which I set drempels to overlay. This way black things didn't get messed up if they were meant to be black. A great majority of the time it didn't choose certain bright colors, so use those for text.

      Anyone know of anything similar for my GNU/Linux/XFree86(Soon to be X.
      • technically it's possible, see xearth, xplanet, etc. In kde, see your background advanced settings.

        Szo
        • Yeah, I used to get a kick out of this and run my wallpaper as ifs or the OSX screensaver knockoff:

          /usr/lib/xscreensaver/xflame -root

          The /usr/lib/screensaver part is there because its not in my path, so I have to tell it where the screensaver (in this case xflame) is, and the -root option tells it to display on the root window. I'm not sure how well this will work on Gnome etc., as they might handle their root window a lot causing them to disrupt the 'saver, but for simple WMs it works great.

          There

  • hrmm.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by abscondment ( 672321 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:56AM (#9374673) Homepage

    Sounds like a deserving candidate for the Museum of Bad Art [museumofbadart.org]

    • I'm not a big fan of art that looks like my 4 year old did it. Paint splatters that sell for millions of dollars, I _just don't get it_. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate some art and admittedly I don't know enough about it to describe what kinds I like but I can point to it. :)

  • More Minimalist really .... (Score:3, Funny)

    by supersnail ( 106701 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:58AM (#9374681)
    ... it crashed my browser!


    (Netscapre 7.2)

  • AI? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by agoatley ( 785428 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @02:59AM (#9374687)
    What exactly does the AI do? Yeah, it has to decide on some basic actions eg adding a circle, but is that worthy of the term AI?

    Surely it's not that complex. Correct me if I'm wrong, but AI is an overstatement.
    -Ashton
    • That's like saying...Algorithm? You're calling this "bubble sort" an algorithm? It's way too simple to be worth of the term algorithm.

      No one said it was a impressive AI!
    • Have you ever looked at what's actually considered AI? If a program uses a search tree with backtracking, you've got something that fits in with the curriculum for the average AI class.

  • I'm sorry, but this looks like crap (Score:5, Interesting)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:05AM (#9374714) Homepage Journal
    I used too produce stuff like this on my atari what.. 15 or more years ago, in basic. I'm not impressed in the slightest. Thumbs down for an image that looks like it could have been produced by my little brother with a crayon.

    Now if you truly want some cool abstract art, try debris [badmofo.org] by Brennen Underwood of nullsoft fame. For some reason it has a tendancy too gather porn pictures in the images it creates. Is it because there's a lot of porn on the net? Or is it because nullsoft = sex. Try it for yourself and you tell me.

  • Wassily Kandinsky... (Score:2, Informative)

    by EricKoh ( 669058 )
    I think the father of abstract art just turned in his grave....

  • Umm... not really. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by applef00 ( 574694 )
    I hit about ten of those random abstracts. They all--every one of them--looked like something I would have seen in a hair salon in the late '80s, early '90s. It's not exactly difficult to grab a few geometrical shapes in various colors and slap them on a solid background. Personally, I'd rather look at those horrid Nagel [patricknagel.com] prints than this pseudo-abstract rubbish. Interesting computer project? Maybe. Art? Absolutely not.

  • Similar Project Evolvotron (Score:5, Informative)

    by knightshrubs ( 732969 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:15AM (#9374764)
    Evolvotron [demon.co.uk]

    From the page: Evolvotron is an interactive "generative art" application for Linux to evolve images/textures/patterns/animations through an iterative process of random mutation and user-selection driven evolution. It's not running in Flash, you may render all images to arbitrary resolutions and is perfect for creating new desktop backgrounds... Also check the Gallery [demon.co.uk] and Animations [demon.co.uk].

    The code is licensed under the GPL. It uses Qt and is multi-threaded.

  • Seems like it would be better as a Ming example... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Granos ( 746051 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:19AM (#9374776)
    The project itself really doesn't impress me. All the K++ people did was use a random number generator to generate colors, gradients, curve coordinates, circles, etc. The actual cool part (Dynamically genereated fully functional Flash movies through PHP) was all the work of the Ming library coders. This is akin to someone creating a spinning rainbow colored 3D cube in OpenGL or someone applying a ton of Photoshop filters to a cool picture of the sky. It looks nice to someone who doesn't know how it was made, but in reality, all of the challenging and innovative things were done by the person who programmed the library, not the person who used some very basic implementation of the library.
    • It looks nice to someone who doesn't know how it was made, but in reality, all of the challenging and innovative things were done by the person who programmed the library, not the person who used some very basic implementation of the library.

      And that is the difference between art and engineering. Art isn't judged by the amount of work that went into it - it's judged purely by whether people think it looks cool. The same sort of person that thinks Kandinsky's art is good might well think this Flash hack
    • All the K++ people did was use a random number generator to generate colors, gradients, curve coordinates, circles, etc.

      If you think that you either haven't bothered to study the generated images nor the code, or are just plain clueless.

      If they'd been entirely random, the images would have been a complete mess. They are not. They follow quite a few rules to produce images that are more visually pleasing that random data would have been.

  • Generated Art (Score:5, Informative)

    by mr i want to go home ( 610257 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:22AM (#9374784)
    The idea of 'generated art' is pretty cool I think. It's certainly a big step back to the roots of Modernist art - which was about explorations of tone/colour/form/balance and not necessarily subject. Unfortunately lots of art at the moment is really quite selfish - Tracy Emin's unmade bed [saatchi-gallery.co.uk] for example...it seems to be a symptom of the voyeristic phase our culture is going through (Big Brother, Blogging, etc)

    This k++ (or whatever) is an ok example, but there are some truly fantastic sites around..Try Pray Station [joshuadavis.com] or (one of my hero's) John Maeda [maedastudio.com]. John's work is incredibly beautiful, and he's a half decent coder to boot.

    • I've got some computer generated art here [cafeshops.com] They are generated by applying a genetic algorithm to the parameters of an iterated function. The program tries to maximise a weighted sum of the powers of the spatial frequencies whilst minimizing the clumping of the trajectories in phase space, leading to some quite intricate and structured patterns.

  • No, this is not art. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by l0ungeb0y ( 442022 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:35AM (#9374820) Homepage Journal
    I'd be reeeeeal curious as to how they define "AI". And no, a PHP class that uses interpolation of random numbers to create vectors is NOT AI in my book.

    The real thing that irks me about this project is that IT'S NOT ART. There is much more to art than just crapping out random shapes, colors and patterns -- which it appears is all this thing does.

    You could make more artistic shapes by giving a paintball gun to a monkey -- or for those on a budget, just by pissing a monkey off.

    I'd suggest the developers take a course in Art101, study up on color theory and composition and then create code that takes aesthetics, design and ambient factors into account.

    By calling their online mess maker "AI generated modern art" is a grave disservice to both Computer Science and the Fine Arts commmunities all in one.

    In response to such heinous crimes against man, machine and nature, I hereby sentence the developes to be the recipient of 100,000 porno popups per annum and be given an AOL CD every month for the duration of their pitiful life... may the lord have mercy on their souls.

    • The real thing that irks me about this project is that IT'S NOT ART.

      I've never fully understood why it's important to determine if something is art or not. I don't care if this thing is "art" or not, I just think it sucks-ass. Something having attained the status of "art" gives it no special status.
      • It's because the damn people and dictionaries conspired to, after such a long use of a positive connotation attached to the word art, to add it has a full blown denotation of the word.

        Now this makes all discussions with the single 3 letter word useless because each author might jump from one meaning to the next in the spawn of a sentence.
    • I'd be reeeeeal curious as to how they define "AI".

      They don't.. the actual site does't even mention AI. I hate when a poster takes the article submission headline and blasts a site for it.

      And who modded up all these quasi art critics anyway? It's art because they say it's art.
      • "And who modded up all these quasi art critics anyway? It's art because they say it's art"

        Having worked for little known corps such as Atari, and having done illustration most my life I think I might have a little knowledge as to what art is.

        If someone hands you a box with some buttons drawn on it and says it's a computer, does that make it a computer?

        I understand that a lot of people, especially techies have a real hard time appreciating art. I imagine it can be quite difficult leaving the left-brain
        • Elitism like this just wants me want to puke. As a "programmer" since I was a child, I find that my experience also massively helps me appreciate art - almost all "art" is highly rule based (even when it claims to break rules, it's successfull only when rules are broken in the right setting and the right way, effectively following rules), and programming have given me a lot of training in structured thought that applies directly to art.

          Based on my experience I'd say most programmers have a very strong fou

    • It most definitively is NOT just pumping out random shapes. You've just repeated the classic Picasso denounciation about a computer program - it's frequently claimed that some of Picasso's works "could have been drawn by a five year old".

      A while back someone wished to test the assertion, by taking a Picasso work that is highly geometrical, and asking a bunch of kids to make drawings by placing the same geometric shapes in relation to eachother.

      None of the kids came up with a result that remotely resembl

  • Where's the AI? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by amacedo ( 779821 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:37AM (#9374827) Homepage
    I seriously fail to spot the AI in this.

    Random number generation is more likely, but I doubt any AI techniques are needed or applicable to this.
  • try this for something with more substance:
    Electric Sheep [electricsheep.org].

  • Monkeys (Score:2, Funny)

    by wan-fu ( 746576 )
    So how many monkeys sitting at terminals connected to this page before we get a real Kandinsky?

  • What does this have to do with graphics cards? (Score:4, Informative)

    by arekusu ( 159916 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @03:56AM (#9374887) Homepage
    Since when does Flash run on the GPU? This is entirely CPU-bound.

  • ... I will wait for the X screensaver.

  • Why PHP? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mrbarkeeper ( 560018 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @04:13AM (#9374922)
    Honest question, no flamebait: Why did they use PHP? You can create the same effects entirely in ActionScript, the native language of Flash.

  • Really? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rixstep ( 611236 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @04:40AM (#9375003) Homepage
    Wassily Kandinsky, father of abstract art.

    Really? And here I thought it was Moliere.

  • I've made a random art generator before (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @04:56AM (#9375042) Journal
    The program made imitations of Mondrian's paintings [google.com]. Not too hard.

  • It ain't Kadinsky (Score:4, Informative)

    by ortholattice ( 175065 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @05:14AM (#9375077)
    While it's interesting in a crude sort of way, it just doesn't capture the intensity, spirit, and complexity of the real thing. You might want to look at what it's trying to imitate. Some samples: Kadinsky, Composition VIII (1923) [yahoo.com], Kadinsky, Yellow-Red-Blue (1925) [ibiblio.org], Kandinsky, Decisive Pink (1932) [abcgallery.com]. Wouldn't you rather have these on your wall?

  • Screensaver (Score:3, Interesting)

    by igrp ( 732252 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @05:29AM (#9375110)
    Very cool. I guess I will retire my screensaver and use this instead. Should be easy to write a simple wrapper that fires up a webbrowser (or maybe call mozilla http://mirror/screen.php directly).
  • Tell you what, go find some software that composes random music, and run that through Milkdrop or Geiss.

    Now THAT would be computer generated art, about a billion times more amazing than this, give or take an order of magnitude. ;P
  • Is it art just because you hang it on the wall?

    Oh, don't get me started...
  • Lest anyone think that is good abstract art, come take a look at my site. I computer-generate 3d abstracts. Also, I paint, draw and sculpt, and have been doing so since my youth. Now I have a degree in Fine Art, but still, you should be careful to just patently state that what you are doing is "pretty", because that is a relative term. What does it mean? What is the purpose? To attempt to generate an interesting composition, right? So why not generate it, decide it's interesting, and then show us that one? Why do we all have to sit through 999 bad ones to get to one good one?
  • How is Flash intensive on your graphics card? It's not like it's hardware accelerated. If anything, it's intensive on your CPU.

  • Open-source content-creation, but no player (Score:5, Interesting)

    by motown ( 178312 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @07:11AM (#9375413)
    What I just don't understand is that Macromedia licenses the flash specs on the condition that it is used by other products (such as Ming) to create content. Apparently, it is not permitted to use the specs to develop an alternative open-source plugin.

    So why is that? It's not like Macromedia is making any money on the plugins, and besides: the more compatible plugins are out there, the larger the userbase for Flash, right?

    Can someone here explain this to me?

  • Big Deal (Score:4, Funny)

    by frenchgates ( 531731 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @08:22AM (#9375713)
    Kandinsky is such old news. When I see an AI art generator that can make a dress out of meat or sell jars of its own excrement for six figures, then I'll be impressed.
  • So this conglomeration of PHP and Ming will let you download the latest Britney Spears single while protecting you from the RIAA???

    :)

    -JT

  • Oh give it time - just a proof of concept so far! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shomon2 ( 71232 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @09:49AM (#9376410) Journal
    I see lots of negative comments, and I really don't think this program deserves it since it's just at the first version and maybe it shouldn't even have been posted yet until it actually does something more visually appealing. What can be seen so far is just the potential. And for me this is really interesting. Only failing is that it's Flash not SVG but that's just my taste.

    I notice for example that the author is also a poet [peakepoems.com] who knows Neruda and uses a bit of surrealism. Vector based art is probably the best way of recreating what was pioneered by a similar artistic genre - Futurism - which used early 19th century typography to produce incredible works of art in written text, echoing the onomatopeia of battles and love of violence and war (ok nobody's perfect). So loads of text all over the place, and perhaps moving about - this is perfect media to showcase a program like this. There are lots of examples (try googling for futurist typography or go here http://www.colophon.com/gallery/futurism/14.html for a look at some of it).

    So I think the author should merge some of his skills and a very good bit of software/art could result.

    The other is an area less touched: improvisational scores - the rules by which experimental artists can improvise. No longer do people have to be bound by what can be printed, and there are now some [explodingart.com.au] examples of software based improvisation scores (wish I could find more examples of the more experimental of these, but am submerged by crap sw when I search). I made one in svg [bris.ac.uk] for example. So this program, if it's to merge vector graphics with AI, could go in this direction, maybe supplying some kind of interaction and participation in a live multimedia event or performance?

    So I see lots of room for improvement but loads of potential here!
  • ...or does this look a lot like the iTunes Visualizer on Valium, and without the music?

    Tim
  • One could couple this page with javascript and you could make your webserver display a screensaver if someone was idle on your webpage too long. When the animation detects mouse movement, have the browser reload your page.

  • Machine-generated art since 1973 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Corvus9 ( 300802 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @10:47AM (#9387119)
    Harold Cohen [ucsd.edu] has been writing computer programs that generate art since 1973.

    His latest project, Aaron [kurzweilcyberart.com], is the result of many years of experiment and refinement. The K++ project can draw abstract polygons. Aaron can draw portraits, landscapes, and still lives using perspective, detail, and composition.

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