Document:Q11156

rob-art is a series of programs written in the course of an ongoing project to develop a system to generate artistic images.
This release includes the Lisp source code for:
"Draw Something"
Draw Something generates simple line drawings. It does this by generating a set or random points, finding their convex hull (smallest enclosing shape), and drawing around that. These stages are a very simple analogue to observational or constructive drawing.
I was inspired to start on draw-something (and rob-art as a whole) by Harold Cohen's program AARON. Ed Burton's ROSE and Kazushi Mukaiyuma's Shizuka, both also inspired by AARON, were influences as well.
"ae"
ae is a toy aesthetic evaluator. It generates simple descriptions of aesthetics, basically just a list of valenced criteria. It also generates descriptions of artworks consisting of a number of figures, each described by a list of valenced properties. It then evaluates artwork against aesthetic and gives the artwork a numeric score, a measure of its value under that aesthetic.
I wrote ae before I'd read Gips and Stiny's "Algorithmic Aesthetics" (University of California Press, 1979 - http://www.algorithmicaesthetics.org/), but I was certainly inspired by the idea of the possibility of an algorithmic aesthetics.
The structure of ae's ontology, with specific concepts generalisable to more broader concepts, is inspired by Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell's work on CopyCat, described in the book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies".
"The Cybernetic Artwork Nobody Wrote"
"Cybernetic" generates random descriptions of possible abstract images. It is based on the poetry generation programs so beloved of basic computing texts, but generates descriptions of images rather than limericks. I think someone will probably have written such a program sometime in the 1960s, so the name refers to the conceptual artwork "The Cybernetic Artwork that Nobody Broke" by Harold Hurrell (1969).