Feels like the mathematical version of "just because you can doesn't mean you should."

"and with 20 billion I can make it hold a conversation."

Related: 'A meeting with Enrico Fermi' https://www.nature.com/articles/427297a

Looks more like an amoeba to me...

Constraints forces creativity. Some well chosen constraints are aesthetics rules that helps you land pleasing results. Poetry has a long history on that matter.

Another example of constrained creativity is early to mid nineties electronic music.

There's something oddly meditative about designing within strict constraints like circles

Yeah, those are all really nice. Good work.

I can't speak to this but I took a drawing class a long time ago. I'm not very good but it was a lot of drawing circles. When you see people freehand stuff it's kind of wild but that's not how people learn how to draw they're just very good at it from practice. Most of learning is drawing very basic shapes, usually circles, and erasing parts that don't make sense and continuing.

There's some information on: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/01/illustrating-animal...

"While sketching, I kept track of the number of circles I was using, counting one for every curve." After sketching an animal, it should be easier to adjust the image by inserting/removing/moving circles.

There are some photos of sketches at the bottom of the page. Looks like they started with curves and turned them into circles later

What's wild is how much clarity and personality you can get from that process. Instead of adding noise, it forces simplification, which actually helps with visual clarity

https://designshack.net/articles/graphics/twitters-new-logo-...

That was referenced in the post as the impetus for making these. Unfortunately it just links to a Google search.

Not sure how precise it really is, but it looks convincing enough to feel intentional

It’s mentioned in the article under the images as the inspiration for this work

wow, that's beautiful - the whole site https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ is an amazing rabbit hole im gonna lose myself in.

He was done a great deal of injustice when he was passed over for the Turing award that was given to Hinton, Bengio, LeCun.

Then there is this from his blog --

Dec 2024: Sadly, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 for Hopfield & Hinton is a Nobel Prize for plagiarism. They republished methodologies developed in Ukraine and Japan by Ivakhnenko and Amari in the 1960s & 1970s, as well as other techniques, without citing the original papers. Even in later surveys, they didn't credit the original inventors (thus turning what may have been unintentional plagiarism into a deliberate form). None of the important algorithms for modern Artificial Intelligence were created by Hopfield & Hinton. Details in the recent technical report, with lots of references, links, and facts.

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/physics-nobel-2024-plagiari...

I thought this was a joke, but he actually did do this first. Impressive!

This is so true. I took a figure drawing class in college and we were instructed to draw with a cloth and charcoal dust. Easily some of the best work I made came out of that restriction.

Architecture too. The worst building come from architects given a blank page to start with. Constraints, and sympathy for the surrounding built environment produce great work.

If you pay closer attention, you can see that some of the designs rely on very deliberate placements of circles; for example, eyes of the monkey and owl, and the nose of the whale.

Those are just the obvious ones that I can immediately spot — there was probably a lot of careful consideration into the placement of circles in order to facilitate good looking arcs and circles that bring the animals to "life".

I don’t think less of this type of content exists. Its just harder to find when inundated with all other slop on the internet.

I was thinking that this would be low-hanging fruit for a model. The parameter space is so tiny compared to what a diffusion model already has to deal with...

You can depict any animal swallowed by a pufferfish with 1 circle.

Corals?

Pelican on a bicycle

minecraft sheep

centipede

An owl?

You also need to encode the painted areas somehow. They are not only intersections on K shapes, but sometimes exclusions as well (like (A^B)/C). Two ways come to mind:

(1) Listing closed curves by vertices. Each vertex of a painted area is an intersection of two or more circles, and delimits a section of a circle. So the section of circles that enclose a circle can be encoded each by the union of:

(1.1) A circle (index); (1.2) A 2nd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a first point; (1.3) A bit identifying the (first) intersection (because there may be 2 possible); (1.4) A 3rd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a second point; (1.5) A bit identifying the (second) intersection.

Note the base circle would be the first intersection of a subsequent section of this closed curve, and the 3rd circle would be the subsequent base circle. So 1/2/3 won't be necessary for subsequent curves. So only (K+2) indices + (K+1) bits are necessary for this encoding.

Total ~K log2(K)+K bits. I hypothesize (left to the reader :)) a closed curve should contain at most 2x13 points. There can be at most 2^13 distinct regions however, so each figure (Animal) can be encoded with less than that many curves per figure. So each figure (Animal) can be encoded with less than 2^13 x 26x(5+1) bits =~ 1.3Mbit.

But that's mostly pathological cases, if each Animal must be a fully connected area, then that might reduce (hypothesis above) to at most only 26x(5+1) bits = 156 bits, or 20 bytes!

I left out a problem which area shapes encoded within each other (like eyes). In that case you need at most another 156 bits per inner cutout shape.

(2) Alternatively, you could use boolean operations to encode each shape. Also left as a fun problem :)

  interface Animal {
    Circle[13] circles();

    // Leftover from Intro to CS, remember to remove
    void make_sound();
  }

Is it impossible, in this day and age, to enjoy a post without thinking about LLMs? It's like an obsession.

Actually, the (in)famous "sparks of general intelligence paper" about GPT-4 included tasks such as "Draw a unicorn in TikZ" which really is not that far off from this task. There were also examples for drawing cars/trucks/cats etc with SVG.

But I do think that evolutionary algorithms or MCMC variants could do a better job of this, especially if paired with an auxiliary model for scoring their intermediate results.

I was thinking it could, actually, given a feedback loop. The tool use would a json that takes 13 circles, each with x, y position, radius, and whether it's filled in or empty, and output an image. It could look at the image and iterate.