Evolution of Mona Lisa Via Genetic Programming

mhelander writes "In his weblog Roger Alsing describes how he used genetic programming to arrive at a remarkably good approximation of Mona Lisa using only 50 semi-transparent polygons. His blog entry includes a set of pictures that let you see how 'Poly Lisa' evolved over roughly a million generations. Both beautiful to look at and a striking way to get a feel for the power of evolutionary algorithms."

Comments

Triangles

[prockcore]

I would've liked to see it done with triangles... complex polygons just feels a bit like cheating. Not that it isn't super cool.

On reddit, someone posted another neat GA algorithm which evolves a car to match terrain:

http://www.wreck.devisland.net/ga/

Re:Triangles

[TheRaven64]

Which brings us to a real use for this kind of thing. Depending on how fast it runs, it could be an interesting form of image compression. 50 polygons is generally a lot less data than 914400 rectangles. For higher quality, you could add more polygons. You then get a resolution-independent version of the original image with some loss of quality. I'm not sure if it's more interesting than topology-based compression, but it's certainly an interesting avenue.