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Mutating Pictures  (View post)

Artem [PersonRank 4]

Monday, October 1, 2007
1 year ago7,478 views

It is somewhat difficult to rate until you see several creatures and get some kind of a scale. Would it make sense to:

1. List some general guidelines. E.g. 1-2 – have to be killed, not even close; 5-6 – might be a face drawn by idiot; 8-9 – I might have thought it's a face if I only had a 0.5 sec look at it

2. Or since it is about determining which creature is better, than another one, would it make sense to *compare* two creatures in the hot-or-not style?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

I like the second idea Artem. It's a good clean concept for similar sites.

As for item 1, I should add that a picture will not get automatically killed even with 0 rating. It's more like an average of many user submissions. Because a picture will just "age" without creating offspring, and the older a picture the higher a chance it will get "accidentally killed" by another, higher-rated picture. BTW, just now I lowered the rating-to-offspring ratio a little, as too many "deaths" were taking place in the first minutes of the site...

mak [PersonRank 4]

1 year ago #

Amazing!
I'm seeing some organically generated creatures that resembles what we get in a genetics experiment.

I suggest also doing the same experiment with lines (not shapes) and try to get something that looks like an insect – a spider for example.

mak [PersonRank 4]

1 year ago #

[off topic]
This is the first time I see you adding a "digg" link! Is this a new trend ;)

Simon Hammond [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

If you are interested in evolving faces then you should definitely try picbreeder.org which has a good representation for this and also has advanced breeding features.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Mak, I did this button a couple of times before, but don't do it too often... in this case, the site needs a lot of helpers for ratings so that it will work...
By the way, good suggestios with lines & spiders. If there are enough visitors in the future to make "evolution" of some sort happen, I can start new picture pools, each with a distinct drawing algo (e.g. non-symmetric + lines for "animal").

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

This one is really good:


ludwik.trammer.pl/screens/muta ...



It even has a hat, a mustache and a tie.

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

and of course beard and vampire teeth...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Interesting, by now every single member of the original population already "died", replaced by new generations. The oldest living member right now is 58 minutes old (not counting the daily backups, which save every day's generation for later).

Joe Torben [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I saw something similar with a world map. Does anyone have a link to that?

Jon Henshaw [PersonRank 4]

1 year ago #

Damn you and your clever distractions! ;-)

Mark M [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I've seen two insanely face-like images in about 10 minutes. Not even, 'that could be a face' but 'it's impossible for this to not be a semi-pro artist's work'

Florian Mayer [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

will creationists sabotage?

Zim [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Interesting research... There are some good images!

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Excellent project! It's a long overdue web-variant of Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker programme.

I'd also like to add my support to the idea of a 'pick the one that looks most like a face' style of rating system.

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Also: What kind of backend are you using for this application? specifically the image generation part?

Tim Broder [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I'll have to try this at home. Work is blocking it as "games"

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

> Also: What kind of backend are you using for
> this application? specifically the image generation part?

Bitbutter, if you arrived in this thread directly, check out the accompanying post – I'm using ExplorerCanvas/ Canvas to generate the images:
blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-1 ...

It would also be possible to generate them as PNGs using PHP GD on the server, but I figured that might bring down my server (too much CPU cycles and storage)...

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Ah thanks: fascinating, i'll look into ExplorerCanvas/Canvas, haven't come across them before.

Mrrix32 [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

I had one that looked like a Devil if you cross your eyes, but guess that doesn't count :D

alek [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Interesting stuff and classic Blogoscoped cleverness – DUGG for sure.

You mention some generational stats and other misc. above ... those are kiinda interesting – recommend you put 'em on the website. I.e. how many you started with, how many generations have gone, how many folks have visited, etc.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

I dropped in a Google Analytics counter but due to not wanting to use a database, which always creates a bottleneck on my server setup, I don't track too many other stuff unfortunately... so right now all I do is some manual tracking... manual meaning I watch the existing 1000 population from time to time to see its oldest member, its new members this minute, and so on... I do make a daily backup of the population though and also a couple of snapshots throughout the day today...

Amagi Tremper [PersonRank 3]

1 year ago #

You seem to have a lot of statistics about the images itself, you'll make something more than that we have on the process page *pls* =)

alek [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

From the DIGG comments (it's on front page now), it sounds like they clobbered you at first ... but server seems to be hanging in there now – nice job Philipp.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Alek, I increased the delay in-between two rounds and also deactivated the progress/ history page (pssst, it's temporarily here now, shielded from view for most mutatingpictures.com/progr-int ... :)). Plus, I lowered the rating-to-mutations ratio again, it doesn't seem to matter tho since even with a lowered ratio right now every generation lasts only about 3 minutes (meaning every pictures gets randomly replaced once by a new-born at least every 3 minutes...)...

alek [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

So per the DIGG comments, have the "boobies" started showing up as people try to subvert the system?!? ;-)

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

This is fascinating, as always with these experiments Philipp dreams up! I'd like to see a "family tree" representation of the data, showing what spawned what, although I bet that would be pretty big!

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Tony you are right, I wasn't able so far to figure out a resource-friendly family tree/ history feature, except for the snapshot of the population I'm making (at least once a day). But these snapshots don't show the mutation from one picture to the next, which would be a huge family line, and considering all the mutations and versions, and also dead ends I'd have to store somewhere, would become too big for the server....

Ozh [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Philipp : yet another mind blowing stuff. You're definitely the most amazing blogger I've discovered this past 5 years.

Jason [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

The faces just look evil to me... how about some curves instead of just triangles. Nice concept though, althought I lost interest after two clicks just because of the monochromatic/artificial look of the faces.

Luka [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

1000th digger! Very good idea these mutating pictures!!

Matt [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Really cool... so far I've seen several very face-like images... two like Jesus, two like demons, one like an ogre and another like a samurai. Interesting how very specific the "faces" end up looking.

Mr Funk [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I'd so "which of these X looks more like a face"

I think it'd speed the process.

This is amazing [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I'd love to learn where the concept for this came from and how it is coded.

I'm just amazed when distributed input can automatically create such beautiful results. (that drawing circle thing is another example)

André Sampaio [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I first saw this page about 4 hours ago and I took a look right now on the progress page and was amused by how fast the faces are being evolving.

Jim Barnes [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Why do they all look like evil warlords?

Karl [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

They're starting to look like villainous western cowboys, with full beards.

Jim Barnes [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Maybe the full beard is an obscuring factor that's more likely to happen than the complex configuration that makes lips, chin, etc. So full beards are more likely to look human.

Augusto [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I am taking right now an anthropology course....
Love the idea!

Ron B [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I agree that it's really rather amazing how they all seem to be evolving towards the look of evil dudes with facial hair. Something to do with the large black areas?

And are we seeing any sort of evolution towards smaller shapes or even 'lines'?

Jim Barnes [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

They are getting little reflective slivers on their eyeballs. This is really crazy seeing what's happening, they are getting more realistic hour by hour. Wonder how far it will go.

Colleen Sullivan [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

You should add a feature that allows us to select areas of the picture that look the most human. It would greatly speed up the process if we could select the part that really looks like a nose or a hat, and that would be taken into account when the picture mutated.

John Clevenger [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

This is perhaps the coolest thing I've seen in awhile. Keep it coming.

Taylor [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

At this point most of the pictures look either like Japanese warloards or Jesus. I wonder if this has some odd underlying psychological explaination.
Hrm...

Ben [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Lol i just saw Voltron

Colleen Sullivan [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Just saw a very convincing monkey.

ciper [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

It would be far easier to compare two faces and choose which is better looking. Sometimes its hard to judge one by itself.

bob dole [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

the level of similarity seems to have increased insanely quickly, this morning they were blobs, and now i'm home from work they're mostly looking like faces.

How are the offspring generated? what level of varience is added each time?

MrWizard [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

It looks like the final result is going to look like a cross between a Transformer and Darth Vader... :-)

Slushpuppie [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Yeah, clearly all japanese warlords, or possibly mogol hordes

cipher [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I agree with ciper, this would work better if two pictures were shown side-by-side, and the user could pick the one that looks more like a face.

Abbie [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I'm amazed at the progress made in such little time. Already almost all the images look somewhat like faces. I'm excited to see how they get refined.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

> How are the offspring generated? what level of
> varience is added each time?

I started out with rating = number of offspring (e.g. a 6 would generate 6 "kids"). Each mutation in the beginning was 15% of the previous polygons replaced by new polygons with random positions. But then more and more people played the game and I lowered both the rating-to-offspring ratio as well as the mutation threshold, this also allowed the server to survive through this.

I have some ideas how to automate this mutation threshold and offspring ratio adjustment, e.g. the script can look at the average number of ratings and then adjust accordingly, or the higher the rating the lower the mutation amount per offspring, or a 1-by-1 comparison for each picture as many of you suggested. However... the only thing I need to figure out is how to implement this so it doesn't bring down the server, ideally without any database connection etc.

Here are some of the neat pictures from the current pool – indeed, a huge tendency towards Samurai warriors right now! I wonder if the system reached a balance on this picture now or if it's just one of many "face" phases.


blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...



By the way, as far as statistics go, 71,407 absolute unique visitors yesterday (53,831 visits from Digg.com)! The bulk of the visitors was from US, Canada, UK, and Australia, then European countries following, not so much from Asian countries yet.

DaveX [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Everything I've seen so far has definitely been in the Japanese warlord "look"... but the progress from my first visits until now is amazing. I'm going to make this a regular part of my day, it's very interesting to follow along with.

Alex p [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

yup, japanese warlords, jesus and the devil

Anand [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

really interesting piece of experiment is going on here and the progress is very visible, congratz.i would keep contributing here to see whats the improvement.

cheers

   <(o)> | | <(o)>
/ /
   (_ _)
   /
   | ________ |
   --------
  
   -^-

Alex p [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I belive that the factor for them lokking japanese is the wide hair ate the bottom and the eyes. This is becuase there triangular in shape and it will be a LONG time before circles stard to come thru, seeing a couple of rectangles tho!

bob smith [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Where's the explanation of the mutating algorithm?

Chris [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I made a list of my favourites so far. Some have round eyes. Definetly not limitied to east-asian looking faces.

thisidea.amuses.me.uk/faces/Bl ...

Onym [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Wow, beginning to see a lot more fine detail / thin lines.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

"Ape Planet Ambassador" is cool :)

June Bug [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

They almost all look like faces now. Perhaps we should start selecting for realistic vs. cartoon traits or something along those lines?

Chris [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I was trying to select for round eyes. And then for ears. But it didn't seem to have much effect.

Onym [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

There are 4 or 5 very distinct faces emerging.

Onym [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

These pictures aren't being mated with one another? They're just having mutations imposed on them?

Ron B [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

So in the 'favorites' images you posted above, the primary triangles that make up the eyes are all in exactly the same place. Are these triangles hard-wired into the algorithm? Or do they all share a common ancestor? (ghengis khan :-). _Can_ you trace the ancestry of any image, incidentally?

Mango [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Ancestry tracing would be a really good feature.

I think the samurai look is because of the use of triangles. Asian eyes are more easily approximated by triangles, and also the helmet. It would take many more generations to get a round head of hair.

What interests me most is that most of the images have those giant lambchop sideburns (which contribute again to the samurai appearance). Since they don't add anything to the face-like appearance, they must be more like a genetic artifact. Did they happen to appear in the same image as the semi-realistic eyes, and came along for the ride?

Kenny [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I've started voting "samurai" pics as 0-4, according to how good the resolve as faces, and "non-samurai" pics as 5-10. I hate that one black triangle!

Mango [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Onym wrote: "These pictures aren't being mated with one another? They're just having mutations imposed on them?"

Wouldn't it be great to have two image populations using different mutation algorithms? Sexual vs asexual reproduction. Don't let the participants know which is which. See how fast each population converges toward realistic-looking faces.

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Fascinating to watch how this unfolds. The difference between today and yesterday is amazing.

[put at-character here]Ron B i can't speak for phillip but i doubt very much that any traits are hard wired into the algo. The eyes stay in roughly the same place relative to the rest of the face because we know that that's where eyes belong, and we keep on increasing the number of 'eyes-in-the-right-place' children in the database.

[put at-character here]Onym: sexual reproduction would be very difficult to implement in a sensible way (i think you'd have to work out some kind of 'face embrology' in order for the combinations to make sense). my guess is that asexual reproduction is happening here.

Mango [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Kenny I don't think that's necessarily a good strategy. A lot of those samurai pictures are really face-like, aside from the big triangle on the side and the funny hat. You might be throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.

Try giving the undesirable triangle a -2 penalty from how you would rate the picture without it. If it provides a reproductive penalty, the algorithm should eventually get rid of it.

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

"What interests me most is that most of the images have those giant lambchop sideburns (which contribute again to the samurai appearance). Since they don't add anything to the face-like appearance, they must be more like a genetic artifact."
[put at-character here]mango The big triangles that make up the 'helmet' do an important job of framing the face area, so i guess there was pressure for them to remain once they got established.

Mango [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

bitbutter: I don't think sexual reproduction needs to be so complicated. You take two 'successful' faces from a given generation, take 45% of the triangles from one, 45% from the other, then add a 10% mutation.

Kenny [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Mango: Sterility is the ultimate reproductive penalty.

John [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Why do so many faces have those large triangles by the cheeks?!?!?
What are you people thinking? LOL

I am trying to breed those out of the pool by not giving any triangle-cheeked face more than a five. Any help is appreciated

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

> Are these triangles hard-wired into the algorithm?

None of the shapes is hardwired, they can (theoretically) all freely move. Practically, due to user selections I saw certain "fashions". Yesterday evening there was an incredible amount of very weird devil horns, and "side burns" but much much higher on the canvas than the ones we're seeing today. And now, this "fashion" disappeared since yesterday.

I don't know what causes these, but as has been mentioned before, I think some of these polygons do a job of e.g. removing ambuigity (e.g. the ambuigity of some people looking for a face in the center, and others in the whole canvas – I think that was a big "issue" for picture survival strategies yesterday), so they become "survival" genes. And then perhaps some of these "surviving" strategies that remove ambuigity then happen to look like, I don't know, a Samurai helmet, and once they do there may be a survival "strategy" that favors other parts of the face to look like a Samurai!

And yes, they very often do share the same ancestor – if you overlay two or three pics and a triangle in both is in the exact same position, there is a good chance it's the same genes somewhere.

> These pictures aren't being mated with one another? They're just
> having mutations imposed on them?

Yup, no cross-mutation. Basically, a single picture mutates completely randomly by some percentage (like say 10%).

One thing I might try to do: add another face pool, like a second island, and then watch if this second island also evolves towards Samurais, or if it's completely different. I'm currently working on bringing a new drawing algo for a new "animal" pool onto the site.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

> I am trying to breed those out of the pool by
> not giving any triangle-cheeked face more than a five. Any
> help is appreciated

This behavior is very interesting – maybe it explains why we saw a fashion come and go yesterday! Perhaps even the best survival strategy for a certain time will cease to be "fit" soon because the rating community gets annoyed by repetitive pictures. This is an interesting spin to it – I wonder if this means there will be constantly new fashions emerging?

I will have to add more options to the progress viewer so you can see these fashions, if they persist...

Dan Tobias [PersonRank 5]

1 year ago #

They kind of all look like cartoon villains to me.

Kenny [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

It would be interesting to see an animation following the mutation of a successful face.

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

[put at-character here]mango:

"I don't think sexual reproduction needs to be so complicated. You take two 'successful' faces from a given generation, take 45% of the triangles from one, 45% from the other, then add a 10% mutation."

Perhaps some interesting things could be thrown up by sexual selection, but i think that in general the system would have more trouble converging on realistic faces than it currently does.

An easy way to picture the problem is to image you have two very life-like faces. They have children via sexual reproduction like you suggested. ll the children end up less lifelike because they each have something weird happening: Many of the children end up with four eyes or two mouths, or two noses etc--The system doesn't 'know' which groups of triangles represent eyes, mouths, or an noses etc, so it doesn't now how to sensibly combine two face images.

The Fishmonger [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

What strikes me as odd here is that I haven't seen a single picture that looks like a woman. To what would you all attribute that effect?

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Angular lines lend themselves better to drawing masculine looking features, and there was a very samurai-ish (male) looking image right at the outset (i just saw him on the 'before and after' page), I'm betting that he's the great granddad of the samurai army!

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

> To what would you all attribute that effect

One possible reason: the algorithm to draw the pictures uses triangles, so it's rather edgy, and perhaps that looks more male. I think it's also possible that there are more male and female raters, though I'm not sure if male raters are more likely to see male faces or if that is unconnected...

But now there's a second pool live on the site: animals, and I used a lot more round shapes for these ones (it's made up of triangles, but also circles and lines). I'm curious what will happen with the animal pool, as "animal" is a very ambigous term...

There's also a second face pool live now. It uses the same origin images as the first one.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

I think a key factor of something looking like a face is some kind of symmetry and the random images with circles don't currently seem to have this trait.

Edit: Damn – I had no ideal I was looking for an animal with those circles. I completely missed the instructions since I'd been to the site before. Perhaps it would be an idea to display the subject in large letters, overlaying the image for a couple of seconds with a "continue" button just to make sure...?

Jacob Raves [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Yeah, I'm interested in voting in the other ones (second face and animal). When will they be up?

Also, the samurai phenomenon is quite interesting. I want to see if thats where it will always go if triangles are used.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Tony, yeah, I was kinda afraid that would happen. I will have to think of a way to make that more clear, other than just using colors.

Anand [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

best ones i got :-)


img529.imageshack.us/my.php?im ...



and the last one ,animal one, that was a shocker why not we just stick to faces ? :-P

Greg [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

They are up. Go to the main page.

Graham Snyder [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I was going to suggest something that's been mentioned a couple of times before – that it might be more effective to compare pictures and select the one that looks more like a face – though perhaps rather than just 2 you could have 4 or 5 examples to compare.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Tony, pls refresh, I added a red "New!" sign when you see an animal, wonder if that'll do the job?

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

That got my attention a little bit... but I kinda new I should have been looking down there. Would it be better for people to switch between faces and animals manually themselves?

e.g. Faces | Animals

Anand [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

yes i like face and animal tabs

and btw animal thing is a bit hard to choose cause animals can be of really different shapes and sizes but lets see

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

> That got my attention a little bit... but I kinda new I should
> have been looking down there. Would it be better for
> people to switch between faces and animals
> manually themselves?

Hmm, I need to think about this. Last weekend during implementation I kinda realized this problem would appear, I pondered starting with at least two categories so people wouldn't be trained to ignore that sentece, which is what happened now. But I didn't see any cool second category that would be fun & somewhat recognizalble right from the start (except male/ female body, which lends itself a lot to symmetry, but I figured it might make the site non-family friendly after a couple of "evolutions"!). The current animal pool is really more of a "beginning" pool, you're barely able to spot anything, so I think the existing face pool kinda needs to "carry" it through this beginning phase until it will (hopefully) look more interesting. I hope people spot this New button now, the only risk is that people by and large ignore this, if only some people top-rate faces in that one these faces should automatically go "extinct" soon in the animal pool :)

June Bug [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

If only pac-man was an animal... Now I'm going to have to spend three more days on this site instead of doing work, just like the past two days!

Shawn P [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

This is great. I think for the animal specification it might be best to specify more types of animals. The face recognition seems to be good for specifically human faces, whereas the animals that show up seem to be all nonsensical probably because where I see a bird someone else might see something that is going towards a horse. If you split it up in to a few more specific categories it might start getting as nice as the faces are.

Graham Snyder [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

[put at-character here]Philipp: You mentioned in an earlier post that the mutation algorithm replaces a percentage of the polygons in the picture. It occurred to me that it might work better if it were possible for the algorithm to also "tweak" some of the existing polygons – slightly changing the dimensions, position and/or rotation each generation. For example, that way we might see things like the "sideburn" triangles shrinking into lines, rather than uprating them because they're otherwise realistic faces, or attempting to breed them out.

Graham Snyder [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I just got a vaguely female-looking face! I think it's the pointier chin and the lips that do it. For want of a better system, here it is on imageshack:


blogoscoped.com/files/mutating ...


If only there were a "link to this face" button! :P

[moved image from img253.imageshack.us/my.php?image=faceft3.jpg to here for faster loading, if that's OK... -Philipp]

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

> It occurred to me that it might work better if it were
> possible for the algorithm to also "tweak" some
> of the existing polygons

Graham, I pondered this alternative I think it's really cool. Maybe I can do this for a future pool, right now I didn't quite know what to do with polygons that would travel outside the screen this way. I could just bump the polygons off at the edges if they intend to move outside, but that might start looking artificial...

Georgie R [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I didn't think the animals was going to work because they are not symmetrical enough, but I think lots of different animals will come up and get refined as long as the rate of mutation is not too high. There seems to be lots of potential bird shapes!

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

I got some that looked like tigers.

Woo 100th post!

Graham Snyder [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

> right now I didn't quite know what to do with
> polygons that would travel outside the screen this
> way. I could just bump the polygons off at the edges
> if they intend to move outside

Why don't you just let them move outside? If the votes tend to make a polygon move towards the edge then it's probably better for the picture, right? Then once they're completely out of frame, you could either delete them or create a new random polygon somewhere in the image to replace them.

Sarah M [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

With faces, so far they all look like stylized samurai. Hard to get past that when large out of shape polygons fit so well with their helmets.

All I've been seeing in the animal section so far is bird shapes, but the ones that are starting to come through are starting to become fairly detailed in their profiles.

It will be interesting to see how it turns out in a few days, almost like a different form of Global Consciousness Experiment.

Patrick T [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

I think the reason why the big triangles have stayed is that:

1) They often delineate the face in a clear way so that everyone has the same reference as to where the eyes, the mouth and the nose should be. That will most likely be a problem for the animals, as we neither know which animal we are seeing nor its orientation. Faces are quite similar, and it was obvious that the face was going to be seen face on and not sideways. For animals, I suggest that you name the animal, and that we see only its face, face on.

2) They hide (partially or completely) many other triangles, thereby making the solution more likely to have a high fitness. Otherwise each hidden triangles has a potential of making the image less face-like. Here, I suppose there is no mecanism to avoid completely hidden triangles.

Colleen Sullivan [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Bummer. It looks like face 1 is steady-stating; at least they look the same as when I went to bed. I was kind of afraid this would happen: you get to a certain point, and then mutations tend to move the image backwards, not forwards. May I suggest lowering the mutation rate as an image pool gets more realistic? Also I second the suggestion of allowing polygons to change shape, rather than just adding or removing them.

Patrick T [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

As to why the faces look masculine, I will speculate the following: feminine faces are more rounded, therefore producing curvier outlines, and slower transitions from dark to pale. I think there would be more feminine-looking faces if there were also gradients, arcs or circular segments mathworld.wolfram.com/Circular ...

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Hi, i've just deployed Face Maker, which is an _awful_ lot like Mutating Pictures (big thanks to Phillip for his permission to deploy it), but uses different scoring and drawing algo's.

No triangles this time, i wonder if the samurai's will still show up?
facemaker.redshiftmedia.com/

Anita [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Wow, this is great!

One thought – why not reduce the # of polygons that change (or the % that they can move/alter) for pics that are rated higher? It seems strange to mutate a close match by the same % as a match that isn't at all close.

John [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

I noticed birdlike images coming up in the animal pool also, I thought it was just me.

Also as to what someone said about the faces starting to look the same, there is an evolutionary theory i remember learning that after a certain point in evolution, it is driven by "BIG" mutations that happen to stick and subsequently smaller mutations to perfect it. Maybe we are at that point now with the faces, where things will be relatively static until something dramatic happnes, that by chance is a big improvement on the face.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Wow, terrific job Bitbutter.
How big is the overall population?

On a meta level it's kind of funny how MutatingPictures.com itself created offspring now, with a mutated algorithm. If your faces will look much cooler than the ones at MutatingPictures.com over time, it will be additional inspiration for me (and others) to switch to a two-pics approach... which would mean that your mutated approach in turn created offspring.

By the way, sometimes the "evolving" is hanging (shows forever..).

dugg:
digg.com/tech_news/Face_Maker_ ...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

> One thought – why not reduce the # of polygons that
> change (or the % that they can move/alter) for pics that are rated higher?

Actually, that already happens since yesterday evening...

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

Hi phillip, thanks!

the population is about 500 (slightly more because of a bug early on ;)). I may generate some more though because there are lots of ppl voting.

I fixed the hanging bug (happened when trying to rate a pic that someone else had already deleted).

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Seems your population is headed straight towards a cat right now bitbutter! :) Cool project.

Stephen Tordoff [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Got load that where variations of the one 'cat' (the first one below) and then got these:


img.techpowerup.org/071002/Scr ...



Both look very cool. Good job Bitbutter

Anita [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Bitbutter – very cool, although it's looking like the "cat" is starting to pull away. A few hours ago I went through ~100 pics and only 10% or so seemed cat-like. Just now I did 50 and almost 40 of them were cats. Sometimes I feel like I need a "neither" option when voting – hard to choose which is better when faced with two similar cats. =)

Stephen Tordoff [PersonRank 10]

1 year ago #

Last screenshot (honest, I just think this is really cool / weird). Stylized face and skull type shape on head. Makes me think of bikers / rockers.


img.techpowerup.org/071002/Scr ...


MolokoV [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

This is quite interesting. Bilateral symmetry is more likely to activate human pattern recognition for faces. All faces basically have the same features in that symmetry, 2 eyes, nos, mouth, outline of face. It converges rapidly.

The animal gene pool is extremely interesting. It has no intrinsic symmetry and the category "animal" has many attractors. No viewpoint or orientation is specified, so it may take a while for some patterns to emerge for different kinds of animals at different angles. I notice some of them look like the faces of dogs or horses – large scale full-screen portraits. Others, only parts of the image look like an animal, a bird, a fish, a quatruped of some kind. Also a head with two ears and a body seems to be emerging in some images.

It's possible that being able to review the samples and read this forum might contaminate the schedule of re-enforcement, but I think as long as people can't direct specific components on the screen to do something specific (change size or position or orientation) there's no "intelligent design" going on, only selective pressure.

I think the animal picture is going to take a long time to converge.

Another problem with the animal picture is there are often several regions of the image that might look like an animal. People who recognize one but not the other may rate that image higher or lower depending on what they see or don't see in the image. Not really a problem, the animal images will converge to the most stereotyped animal shapes, I would think.

The first face genepool seems somewhat biased towards Samurai and Heavy Metal faces for some reason. It could just be that the angular/high contrast renderings resemble the graphics used in those genre, and japanese inkbrush paintings.

This may have value as some sort of projective psychological test, but it would take way too long to administer, you'd have to sit there and click buttons for days to get it to converge to some sort of personal Rorschach icon.

Scott [PersonRank 0]

1 year ago #

Am I the only one that thought of this clip from the Carl Sagan series Cosmos?

+ Show video

bitbutter [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

[put at-character here]anita: "Bitbutter – very cool, although it's looking like the "cat" is starting to pull away."

Thanks. It seems the 'cat' has spawned a few strong children with a distinct character too. In one line the puffy white cheeks turned black, turing it from podgy to gaunt and its wide eyes shrunk to little black pebbles, giving a line of very solemn looking devils like this one:


img221.imageshack.us/img221/86 ...

Georgie R [PersonRank 1]

1 year ago #

My bird theory was right although I thoug