Neural Nets Make Art While High

brilanon writes "Telepathic-critterdrug is a controversial fork of the open source artificial-life sim Critterding, a physics sandbox where blocky creatures evolve neural nets in a survival contest. What we've done is to give these animals an extra retina which is shared with the whole population. It's extended through time like a movie and they can write to it for communication or pleasure. Since this introduces the possibility of the creation of art, we decided to give them a selection of narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics. This is not in Critterding. The end result is a high-color cellular automaton running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user."

Re:design geekery

[rubycodez]

That painting is a biohazard and regulated medical waste if disposed. However, had she used a feminine pad instead of paper OSHA has ruled in that case menses on a feminine hygiene product is not a regulated medical waste.

Re:Self-promotion AND false controversy?

[mcvos]

What are you complaining about? The GP didn't say critterding or critterdrug suck. He just pointed out it's self-promotion (the submitter of the story is the guy who made critterdrug), and it tries to seem interesting by suggesting there's some sort of controversy, without linking to an article that attacks critterdrug for whatever's supposed to be controversial about it. So brilanon tries to seem more interesting than he is and hopes for attention.

I'm not saying it's less interesting than Spore. Critterding sounds quite interesting (I don't see the point of critterdrug much), but the only thing controversial about critterdrug is that he's trying to hype it through false controversy. Well, now he's got a real one, I guess. I bet that'll make him happy.

Re:design geekery

[fractoid]

Whenever I hear people arguing over art (and it is usually as you say in your initial summary, that one will say they don't care for an artist's work and the other insists that the first is merely too ignorant to truly understand the art) it reminds me of the scene in Zoolander where the male models are all doing the rounds telling each other, "no, I think YOU'RE missing the point". There's so much effort put into trying not to be the crass, uncultured lout who doesn't understand 'the vision' that no-one actually realises that there IS no 'vision' and it's all just a big glob of pretentious wank.

As for the point about Pollock's later paintings having higher fractal dimensions, that's a natural consequence of random splotches of colour as you add more splotches and more detail, regardless of the actual artistic merit. You might as well say that maps of Britain have become more and more aesthetically pleasing as mapmakers made more precise maps and the coastline's fractal dimension increased.