{"id":584,"date":"2009-12-11T14:47:32","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T19:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=584"},"modified":"2009-12-11T15:44:35","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T20:44:35","slug":"java-applets-superintelligent-shades-of-the-color-blue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=584","title":{"rendered":"Java Applets: Superintelligent Shades of the Color Blue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jhlabs01\"<\/p>\n

“Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue…<\/em>”
\n–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What could be more intelligent and etherial than a clever java applet like this one<\/a> made by Jerry Huxtable.\u00a0 It’s creative and I don’t know why.\u00a0 Applets by their very definition are tiny, but clever programming seems to be able to give Herculean strength to those little pieces of interpreted java code.\u00a0 In fact, this applet has no buttons or sliders whatsoever; it starts automatically when you visit the page and the only way to turn it off is to leave.\u00a0 You can’t save anything or load anything, the only thing the applet needs from you is a mouseclick.\u00a0 This is almost as minimal as a screensaver.<\/p>\n

I had to push the zoom button (oh, there’s a button) and then take a screenshot of the zoomed image.\u00a0 I had a lot of fun with this thing.\u00a0 Jerry, the author of the applet says, “At present there is too much variation in the child images – they often don’t bear any similarity to the parent.”\u00a0 But I found that to be good thing.\u00a0 One click and you could be jumping from one branch to another in the animal kingdom of genetic art.\u00a0 Other similar genetic art programs I’ve tried like Kandid<\/a> suffer from the opposite problem: imagery is too monotonous.\u00a0 But I’m the kind of person who likes to push all the buttons and move the sliders to the very end, so a genetic art program that hops rather than walks is fine with me.<\/p>\n

For those of you wondering what genetic art is:\u00a0 genetic art is imagery made by a process of combining the graphical parameters of\u00a0 other images to make new, hybrid ones.\u00a0 You breed<\/em> images.\u00a0 If you ever wanted to grow up and live on the Island of Doctor Moreau and create a world of hideous monsters and reign supreme over them, laughing madly during the day and barricading yourself up in a fortress during the night while your insane brood prowls and parades their grotesque and abominable lives to the accompaniment to a bloodchilling symphony of\u00a0 screams beneath the light of the moon…\u00a0 Well, try playing with genetic art instead.<\/p>\n

These are rough hewn images; torn from the Earth and spilled from the test tube.\u00a0 I like them.\u00a0 There’s an artyness to them.\u00a0 Good art doesn’t have to be great art.\u00a0 There’s the smell of flowers and then there’s the smell of old air freshener.\u00a0 Which one is more provocative?\u00a0 More suggestive of genetic speculation and mutative properties?<\/p>\n

\"jhlabs12\"<\/p>\n

What about the applet?\u00a0 How does it work and what’s it all about?\u00a0 In Jerry’s own words (and the site is offline at the moment):<\/p>\n

This applet lets you create art using a genetic algorithm. It generates a random mathematical function and displays an image representing the function in the centre square. It also generates twelve random variations on the image, displayed in the squares around the outside. Click on the centre square to create new variations, or on one of the small images to move that image to the centre and create variations on it. Press the “Zoom” button to see the centre image displayed larger in a new window. Press the “Tree” button to show or hide the function tree (or at least as much as will fit) of the centre function.<\/p>\n

See a gallery of pictures created with this applet.<\/p>\n

This applet is (like all my stuff) still under development. At present there is too much variation in the child images – they often don’t bear any similarity to the parent. There’s a lot of tweaking of parameters to be done to get the mutation rate right. Other things which need to be done are to implement crossover between images and determine a good mix of mathematical functions to choose from. There should also be a way to save your art.<\/p>\n

How does it work?<\/p>\n

The applet builds a tree representing a mathematical function, with one node per function, leaf nodes being variables such as X, or Y, or numbers. This function is then randomly called to determine its probable range and then normalized to that range so you actually get valid colors. The function is then called for every pixel in the image to calculate the color of the pixel. There are two sorts of node: color nodes and numeric nodes. A color node returns a color when evaluated, a numeric node returns a numeric value. The root node is always a color node, but nodes below this will usually be numeric. For example, one sort of color node calls three numeric nodes to determine the red, green and blue components. Another calls a single numeric node and looks the result up in a color map. The mysterious “N” function you may see is a normalising function which samples its child function to determine its likely range and normalises it to between 0 and 1.<\/p>\n

Mutation is done by traversing the tree and probabilistically changing parameters or type of a node or by pruning the tree at any point and replacing the pruned part with a new random subtree.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All you need to know is click on something.\u00a0 Even the current image in the center can be clicked on to, uh, –breed it with itself<\/em>.\u00a0 See how weird this gets?\u00a0 If things start to get really ugly then just click on any of the outer images that look completely unlike the center one, or just refresh the page in your browser which will re-initiate the applet, kill all it’s children, clean up the lab and allow you to start all over again.\u00a0 C’mon, it’s not murder if you’re wearing a lab coat.\u00a0 I forget who said that.\u00a0 Doctor somebody…<\/p>\n

Enough of that.\u00a0 Let’s get to the art.\u00a0 Here are a few of my favorite things…<\/p>\n

\"Mount

Mount Java Applet Sinai<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Red

Red Land<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Also

Also Red Land<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Skybolt\"

Skybolt<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Dissolving

Dissolving Seascape<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Horizon\"

Horizon<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Arctic

Arctic Pathway<\/p><\/div>\n

\"In

In for landing<\/p><\/div>\n

\"It

It worked for Rothko<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Why

Why won't it work for me?<\/p><\/div>\n

What else?\u00a0 I would like to thank “Talfrac<\/a>” Rafael La Perna from Italy, the home of art, for unknowingly tipping me off to this java applet via his Flickr gallery.\u00a0 Would you like to view his DNA<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue…” –Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy What could be more intelligent and etherial than a clever java applet like this one made by Jerry Huxtable.\u00a0 It’s creative and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/orbittrap.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/jhlabs01.png?fit=395%2C398","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":959,"url":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=959","url_meta":{"origin":584,"position":0},"title":"Collidoscope.com’s Modern CA –Animation Wonderland!","author":"Tim","date":"19 March, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"[update: 01\/04\/2026, unfortunately the site for these CA java applets is no longer online.] There are Cellular Automata java applets, and then there are THESE Cellular Automata java applets! I'm excited.\u00a0 These things are pretty cool.\u00a0 Some of you may have seen them before.\u00a0 They've been online since 2002, or\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 5 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 5 comments","link":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=959#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1936,"url":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=1936","url_meta":{"origin":584,"position":1},"title":"Attention all passengers departing Munich airport!","author":"Tim","date":"22 November, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Hermann invites stranded passengers at the Munich airport to share a beer. A look at one of his artworks and the java applet based method by which Hermann displays them. Jwm-art's two recent images of similar simple methods but rich style. 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No digital construction is involved. from http:\/\/www.richardtoddartist.com\/about\/ I had the idea for a liquid canvas about 20 years\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=1782#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/orbittrap.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/richard-todd-5.jpg?fit=400%2C604&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":608,"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions\/608"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}