For my generative project I am planning to do an egg drop simulation. The egg drop, for those that may not know, is a staple activity in most public elementary school science curriculums. The challenge is to design and build a container that will protect a raw egg when dropped from a specific height.

I recall doing this several times throughout my education as a child. Each time I zealously over-designed my solutions, and I don’t believe I ever successfully protected the eggs from harm. I intend to conquer this challenge once and for all by having a computer design my solutions for me.

Initial Concepts

Predator-prey simulation using flocking

I explored several different simulation ideas initially. They were all largely based on flocking algorithms. My original idea (bottom-right) was a simulation that used flocking algorithms to mimic an environment of predators and their prey. The idea was to track the populations of each species and compare that to the predicted behavior according to the Lotka-Volterra equation.

Evolve flocking creatures within an ecosystem

My second idea (bottom-left) was to create an evolutionary ecosystem where the animals (the triangles) were competing for food (the dots). Every X clock cycles the fitness of each animal is evaluated and they breed, evolving new animals. Parameters that would vary across creatures might be things like their maximum speed, propensity to wander, and their sensitivity to food.

Simulated dog fight

A third idea (top-right) was to create a dog-fight simulation. Possibly once an entire side of the battle had been defeated, you could evaluate the fitness of each ship and recombine them to create a new generation of ships and watch the battle evolve that way. Otherwise you might just watch the ships chase each other around the screen and be able to tune the parameters manually to see what different effects they have.

Evolutionary Egg Drop

At some point during all of this, I had the idea for the egg drop simulation. The idea of revisiting this design challenge from my childhood was so appealing that I immediately abandoned my desire to play with flocking algorithms in order to pursue it.

Evolving Egg Cartons

Containers can vary by rigidity, size, and wind resistance

One of the first things I began to consider is what qualities of a potential egg container could be made variable such that a variety of containers can be generated and bred together. One common solution to this problem in reality is a parachute, so wind resistance is an obvious quality that can probably be easily mimicked. Another common solution is to wrap the egg in a lot of packing material to dissipate the force of impact. I can probably create a similar effect by suspending the egg inside the container using springs of varying length and rigidity.

Evaluate fitness to evolve not just a solution, but an efficient solution

It’s not enough to consider a solution fit if the egg survives. That could easily lead to boring solutions that just increase the wind resistance or springiness of the container until the egg survives. I want a variety of spring lengths, rigidity, and wind resistance for the solutions, so I think I’ll need to develop some kind of measure of efficiency in addition to ensuring the survival of the egg. My hope is that this process will converge on local maxima contingent upon the random initial conditions, rather than always evolving the same solution.

I can penalize high wind resistance by trying to minimize the amount of time it takes the egg to reach the ground. I will also attempt to assign some cost to having overly long springs. The spring rigidity may not need special consideration in the fitness function: if the springs are too loose, the egg will bang into the ground; if the springs are too rigid, they’ll just transmit the force directly to the egg and break it.

Toxiclibs Implementation

I’m looking at Toxiclibs to implement this simulation. Toxiclibs gives me springs, gravity, and 2D meshes. My hope is that by subclassing some of these tools, I can access the data I need to evaluate a container’s fitness and breed new ones. By Thursday I hope to have at least a 2D mesh egg that breaks when dropped. If I can implement at least this much, I should have a sense for how much trouble I’m in on this project.

Sources:
http://www.learningprocessing.com/tutorials/php/
http://wiki.processing.org/w/Saving_files_to_a_web-server

This ended up being a little tricky, but as long as you have access to a webserver to load the PHP script that parses your data and stores it to an on-server text file, you can run your processing applet from anywhere and just send parameters in via url specified variables.

For example, the string:
http://littlegreencocktail.com/php/loadstrings.php?file=test1&type=save&x=200&y=100
includes variables ‘file’ that is set to ‘test1’, ‘type’ that is set to ‘save’, ‘x’ set to 200, and ‘y’ to 100.

With some editing of the sample code from the first source listed above, my php script now saves “200, 100” to the file test1.txt, adding a new line to the file if it pre-exists, otherwise first creating the file.

Generative Tentacled Eyeball Monsters (of Doom?)

Starting with another relatively light generative project, this project was done as a Halloween present for the creator’s children. The monsters were created by algorithmically placing “monster bits” like tentacles and eyeballs from a kit of parts. This is an extremely straightforward application of generative programming, but one that is quite appealing to me. The graphics used here are pleasant but not particularly inspired, but I could see a similar system being used to create some really inspirational stuff. For example, generating silhouettes for Monster designs based on a given physiological feature (Make me some tentacle monsters, some quadrupeds, some stuff with shells, etc).

Evolution – Survival of the Fittest

Evolution picks up on the trail blazed by many of the genetic algorithms we discussed in class, specifically Ludivine Lechat’s Graphical Cellular Domestication. The program creates organisms from a template, assigning each various properties based on each creature’s taxonomy. Each creature can then go on to mate and predate, passing on its computational DNA to future generations. The notion of dynamically generating creatures is very appealing to me from a purely aesthetic view, while the notion that physical characteristics and inherited data can affect their behavior makes this sort of project highly compelling.

Cell-F Assembly

Simple concept, elegant execution. Cell-F essentially takes data from the classic Game of Life program and stacks results from each generation vertically. When these points are translated into 3D volumes, they take on a sort of eerie hybrid of the orthogonal and biological.

1. Hair Particle Drawing

In this rather weird project, the artist developed software that takes an image and redraws it… using curly hair patterns!
The original photo presented in the website is labeled “Bush”, and has George Bush’s image made up of hair. I appreciate the satire and the use of double meaning for the word bush.

The two rightmost photos show two stages of the process of generating such a photo. It is animated on the screen, you are more than welcome to check it out yourself and upload your own image. In honor of Valentine’s day, I uploaded a heart and thought it would be funny to see it made out of curly hair.

What I like about this project is that it combines two worlds – a static image of a person, or any other object the user wishes and a piece of curly human hair, and uses the hair to re-create the image. The new image is no longer either of the originals – it’s not a hair, and it’s not the image. It’s quite disgusting, if you ask me. I also like the fact you can load your own image and experiment with it.

The link can be found here. Enjoy!

2. SUBSTRATE

The following online gallery has lots of stuff that the artist created using processing. One that specifically attracted my attention was a simple algorithm that creates a city-like form, as can be seen in the following images:

I really like the stonewash effect the artist added to it to make it look cooler. I also appreciate the fact that an algorithm can create a rather random image, that will look like a city map to us. Makes me think about the elements that compose a map, and as clearly this is not a real map depicting a real place, what in our mental model is “a map”, and how does this generated image fulfill that.

You can play with it, it is addictive! Go here.

Also, from the same artist, I had to add another one.

3. Hyperexperience

For my third “looking outwards” item, i chose a non-digital form of randomly generated art. Not only it is non-digital, it is also crowd sourced. The artist created an installation of a wall which you can tear up and stick things of you own. I am always excited to see these crowd-sourced project come together, as they seem to have no one managing them or directing them, but somehow they maintain a common language and refrain from becoming just a random mess. Introducing human behavior as your random component, brings some beautiful results!

Check it out over here !

Generative Fluids by field.io

[vimeo 1870521 w=600]

I think this is a particularly beautiful fluid simulation. Rather than use a complicated physics engine, the approximation is based off of particle metaballs, and the texture is created by a combination of shaders and photographs. Its not quite realistic, but a close approximation using a much simpler method, with a very stylized look and feel. They later took the same simulation and altered it slightly so that the particles would be attracted to text in the background to create some very interesting font effects

Sonic Acts IX Identity by Coup

This generative process (although analog) produced stunning visual results. The image was created by progressively zooming out the original and then overlaying it in a different color over the original.

“Starting point was a process that would generate the design. With every printed item an extra layer was added to the printing sheet containing a zoom-out of the same design in a new pantone colour. All items have been cut in several ways from that same printing sheet, which results in different crops of the design for each item.
As a result of this process, the final item (the book cover) was cut from the complete message containing seven solid pantone colours.”

Kokkugia | Swarm Matter

Swarm Matter creates forms through emergent patterns. Kokkugia uses this logic on several of their larger architecture projects using the paths of people or traffic through the space as the “particles” to generate the larger forms. I think even these ornamental pieces are beautiful.