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).
@Anders Hoff, thank you for making your site work just fine with javascript disabled. I really appreciate that.
The father of all of this is William Latham.
https://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/
(or John Conway, but that's another league)
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
About half a decade ago I had added a random blot generation to my now-unmaintained-site 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.
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
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
I was fascinated by Jared Tarbell's work and his website some time ago: http://www.complexification.net/gallery/
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.
I wonder if these algorithms have been applied to sound generation....
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...
Awesome work! Any one knows why did the author closed the shop?
Davinci pointed out that a tree’s thickness is constant if you slice it in a semi circle. 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...
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-gan...
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!