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Computer-Aided Lego Art Project

Posted by timothy on from the how-they-made-naughty-pictures-at-vesuvius dept.

rsk writes "Justin Voskuhl, a Google engineer, in a 2-fold bid to fight boredom and figure out something to cover a large barren wall in his living room, one weekend developed a Java program using an annealing algorithm to figure out the best layout and colors of Lego blocks to reproduce a source image exclusively in Lego blocks inside a frame. He plans to release the source code soon. I probably would have just painted the wall ..."

5 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Re:slashdotted already! by dnwq · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nyud.net mirror. Slow, but works.

  2. Eric Harshbarger by amyhughes · · Score: 4, Informative

    This guy has been doing LEGO mosaics for years, and if you google a bit you'll find others and the code for creating them.

  3. Re:slashdotted already! by rsk · · Score: 3, Informative

    Working on getting this horse running again. Sorry for that guys.

  4. Re:In a frame on his wall? Really? by greg_barton · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Anita Barrio neighborhood. It's along I-10, on the opposite side from the freeway, facing a park. I don't know the exact address off the top of my head.

  5. Re:In a frame on his wall? Really? by IICV · · Score: 2, Informative

    He's using simulated annealing. The idea is, you start with some state you can get to easily, and then either a) make a random change to the state or b) make a change that tries to improve the state. You have some variable T that determines what percentage of the time you do a. It starts out at some high percent, and then slowly goes down to 0%. The more slowly you decrease T, the closer to optimal your answer is. You can even find optimal solutions to NP complete problems if you let T decrease infinitely slowly.

    Basically, this took ten hours per image because he wanted really good results.