Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Mutating Pictures Gallery

The Mutating Pictures experiment has been running for a week now. As you may know, all pictures are originally randomly created, some with symmetry, some without. Most of the ratings – and thus evolution, as high ratings create mutated offspring – happened during the first 24 hours. Here are some of the results of the first face pool; again, no single individual drew the artworks, they’re “drawn” by crowd intelligence, that is, created thanks to all of you:

Chris also went ahead and gave some of these names. The “Samurai” period may not be an end result of the mutation but a mere fashion; time will tell, but I saw other image “fashions” pass by during the first day.

Below are the animal and body pools. The animal pool is allowing all kinds of shapes (triangles, circles, lines, in black or white) while the body pool is only allowing circles (in black or white, and with symmetry). Both pools didn’t yet achieve superb pictures – they didn’t by far get the rating attention of the first face pool yet, but the lack of symmetry, as well as intentionally more ambiguous or harder “goals,” may further slow them down. I picked some of the better images to show here:

The second face pool has been running since day three. While it was using the exact same set of originally created 1000 random pictures, it’s running completely independent of the first face pool (even though the dynamics of the site, e.g. the community getting bored of a certain type of face in pool 1, may affect any other pool). Results are constantly progressing, but already interesting:

In the meantime, Bitbutter created an offspring experiment called Facemaker which uses a different rating system than Mutating Pictures (instead of rating from 1-10, you’ll always pick the more face-like image from two presented) for some also very interesting results.

Without making an individual choice of which image from the pool of 1000 drawings to present, you can also just merge them. Below images overlay a random 150 drawings from the first pool, followed by the second pool, each resulting in the pool’s average (potentially also merging or eradicating independent “sub-species” within the pool):

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