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Parent Message
Goals
I started playing around and after 25 clicks, I still wasn't sure what I was doing... Am I "guiding" the system to attempt to create some image I want (like you mention in the intro), or simply picking my favourite images for the sake of it? I guess you mean the second, but that's not immediately clear by the description. I also think that 100 is a bit too large a number to reach! That aside, I think it's amazing the amount of cool patterns that this thing can create! You'd expect to get bored of them after a while, but no... What you going to use all the data for? |
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Re: Goals (long reply)
Alex, Thank you for taking the time to have a look at the experiment. Your question is a good one. In general, interactive evolutionary systems are designed to provide a convenient tool for exploring a space of possibilities, they are less useful when you are trying to achieve something specific. Therefore I would say that your goal is to try to find forms that are 'cool'. The instructions are deliberately a little vague on this point because I don't want people to feel like there is a "right way" or a "wrong way" to use the system. Perhaps I should amend the instructions to emphasise that there are no right answers when trying to explore the space of forms. I have had others comment that they think they might be spending too long on each decision. 100 generations doesn't take very long to get through when you don't agonise over every decision -- it should take only 10 minutes or so to make 100 selections. I think generative art systems like this one are great because they can offer so much variety with such little effort on the part of the user. It's slightly more difficult to get the tool to work correctly -- I've been working on this system so much recently that all I can see when I close are these images. :-O The goal of the experiment is to compare the model of curiosity that I have developed with the exploratory behaviour of people using the generative art system. My previous pilot study indicated that the agent can do quite well and I'm hoping to confirm this result with the data I'm collecting in this study. One of the principle criticisms of interactive evolutionary systems, such as Kai's Texture Explorer, has been that the user doesn't feel in control; with a low mutation rate the resulting forms often look alike and are of little interest, raising the mutation rate results in forms that seem to bear no relation to their selected parent(s). You may find that this is the case in certain areas of the design space presented with the experimental applet. My goals with my research are to try produce better generative systems that can be used to filter out uninteresting examples of a style, and provide an "autopilot" that can explore the space for you and bring back the most interesting of its finds. Used as a kind of filter, a curious design assistant could ensure that the forms presented are interesting without the user having to play with the mutation rate. Obviously, in addition to modelling curious behaviour the tool would benefit from the ability to build a profile of a user's other aesthetic preferences but my current research is focussed on the modelling of curiosity in the creative process because there has been hardly any computational work in this area. A curious design agent acting as an "autopilot" provides opportunities for creating non-interactive versions of generative systems that can produce a continuous stream of interesting works within a given style without user intervention. This possibility has some potentially interesting commercial applications which I am investigating now. This may sound a lot like user profiling or data mining and indeed it is. The idea that novelty is "interesting" is one that has been investigated in data-mining systems and this work is built on similar ideas applied to creative domains like art and design. Potentially similar sorts of curious agents could be used to find "interesting" images or documents on the web. I might have a go at that in the near future but for the moment I'm concentrating on generative processes. Ooo... that was a long reply. Well, you did ask! ;-) I hope other people will be as interested in taking part in this experiment. -RoB- |
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More Pretty Patterns
As a reward for those people who managed to get through reading my long reply to a short question, here is a another applet that I've just finished writing: http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rob/java/applets/fractals/JuliaNebula.html This applet provides an endless stream of randomly generated strange attractors. There's nothing smart about this applet, there's no curious agent behind the curtain pulling the fractal strings, but it does produce some beautiful patterns. If you're tired from performing those 200+ mouse clicks whilst doing my experiment then follow the above link, expand the window to full screen (press F11 on IE), stick some chill music on the stereo, turn the lights off and relax... ;-) Thanks to everyone taking part in the experiment, -RoB- |
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