Pictures by Hive Mind

nofrance writes "A very interesting little experiment where multiple viewers get to select whether to set a single pixel to black or white, to help build a picture. All pictures can also be viewed as animations over time, often showing just how close the picture got to finished before returning to something closer to static."

Comments

People working together...

[dada21]

...what percentage of them are trolls?
We once tried to use about 300 windows in a high rise to display a picture using lights. What a fias o getting people to follow directions.

This is interesting as the image progresses quickly.

The human scanner, 1 person per pixel.

Collective ass

[GrAfFiT]

"Site overloaded. Either this has been linked from somewhere with heavy traffic, or you're experimenting with a clever script to try and mess with the pictures. Come back later, or stop it."
Maybe we should stop trampling his server till it melts down, move our asses out of this mess and wait for it to return to a solid state ? Ho wait. Maybe I should submit a request to our server melting overlord.

Re:pixelfest

[Xzzy]

That is pretty cool. I did something of a similar bent a few years back, though with different goals. I wanted to see if people were capable of participating in an art project without being asshats.

http://web.archive.org/web/20021011144257/http://t ru7h.org/society/

Short version is, they couldn't. There were some cool things a few people did (that link is one example), but it was always done by one person and some scripts, rather than a group.

Don't have it up anymore, the way I stored the data was pretty inefficient and was too expensive in terms of CPU time to keep available.

urban dead

[The OPTiCIAN]

The guy who wrote this (kevan.org) has written lots of neat online games. My favourite is urban dead - urbandead.com. It's completely pathetic for the first five minutes and then utterly addictive. I recommend starting as a fireman :)

Re:urban dead

[JeremyALogan]

I play all three of my UrbanDead characters every single day, and because of this I've come to one conclusion. Kevan just isn't a very good coder. It takes him weeks to implement simple game additions and there have some pretty horrible known bugs floating around out there. I mean christ... there was a buffer underflow bug that was happening when zeds would get headshot-ed and his solution was to say "if their AP is over a billion it must be zero". So now instead of adding a little code that'd be something like:

$XP = $XP - $headshot_ammount;
if ($XP < 0) $XP = 0;

or, better yet:

if ($headshot_ammount > $XP) $XP = 0;
else $XP = $XP - $headshot_ammount;

he's apparently checking XP on every page load and resetting it if it's huge. Ignoring the DB overhead this is just stupid. Not to mention that he shouldn't be using an Unsigned Integer in the DB anyhow... a Signed SmallInt is MORE than large enough and if it failed it'd fail a lot more gracefully (someone having -2 XP instead of 4,294,967,293). Even an Unsigned Integer would make more sense.

Take a look at the known bugs... they're mostly pathatic, the kind of mistakes amatuers make.

Theres also a lot of things the game should do that it doesn't. For instance sorting your inventory. Dozens of GreaseMonkey scripts and Firefox plugins have cropped up on the web to fix things that'd be trivial to implement on the server. Hell, I've written a number myself. I wish he'd OSS the project (even if the license didn't allow us to use it). I'd really like to help him get the game together. I'm tired of running 8 different GM scripts just to make it playable.

Re:pixelfest

[Sheepdot]

And it has a history. (Takes a while to load: in Flash)

Here's what we could use for the patent section

[martinultima]

Something that's actually useful (mentioned here 'cause it's from the same guy): The Prior-Art-O-Matic. "It's a series of randomly-generated product ideas! It raises questions about the nature of prior art in patenting issues, has some inspiring ideas, and is occasionally amusing!"

Hivemind Vector Drawing? Hivemind CAD?

[sanman2]

What if this Hivemind approach could be applied to drawing a vector image. Or even CAD, for building a house/car/spaceship? Suppose a webpage could feature a large vector-drawing canvas, sort of like a simplified version of Adobe Illustrate or the Macromedia Flash editor. Perhaps it could be built using AJAX. Start off with a blank canvas, and allow a visitor to lay down a single vectorized stroke. Then see what everyone's strokes all add up to. This 'wisdom of crowds' idea is pretty intriguing. Anyone have any links to other webpages based on this idea? Anyone have any ideas for what might make for a good webpage project based on this idea?

SwarmSketch

[adpowers]

I'm a fan of SwarmSketch. Each user can draw so many line segments, and then they can vote to make certain lines lighter or darker. The system averages the darkness from each user to find the darkness of the line. Each month is a new themed picture.

letters is much cooler

[mike6496]

sorry.. but this is much cooler.. http://web.okaygo.co.uk/apps/letters/flashcom/
(look in the lower left corner to see how many people are currently dragging letters around)

Re:Reminds me of a story of a writing assignment

[Animats]

There are writers who can bring that off.

There's a famous story about this. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle once accepted an advance for a new book, but hadn't made much progress as the deadline approached. So they moved into a cabin for the duration to finish the job. They took turns writing for 12 hours a day, with story discussions during their overlapping wake periods. The resulting novel was successful, and it's not obvious who wrote which parts.