Doodle Something

- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.




In light of Crystalpunk's effort to advance Doodle Knowledge, in which Aaron has surfaced already, it was with a smile of recognition that 'Draw Something' by Rob Myers came to our attention. 'Draw Something' is a software-project aiming to produce a software-program that will make free-hand drawings guided by an inate sense of aestetics. It is very much inspired by Cohen's Aaron but open source, which means we can actually check what it is doing rather than trust the artist on his word. This Online Flash version is an earlier installment which uses a neat trick (toggle the sceen using the 'a' key) while the newer version 'knows' about colour and, more importantly, is guided by "ae, 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." Which is to say that 'Draw Something' tries to create software that evaluates its own output, moving up from doodle to image in each single run. It is interesting to see that the coloured images do remind one of the later Aaron, even though they are also clearly different; perhaps we are seeing the formation of a school? Crystalpunk likes the spirit of this drawing machine the fact that Myers quotes Hofstadter and Mitchell's "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" adds to its karma even more.