Neural Nets Make Art While High

brilanon writes "Telepathic-critterdrug is a controversial fork of the open source artificial-life sim Critterding, a physics sandbox where blocky creatures evolve neural nets in a survival contest. What we've done is to give these animals an extra retina which is shared with the whole population. It's extended through time like a movie and they can write to it for communication or pleasure. Since this introduces the possibility of the creation of art, we decided to give them a selection of narcotics, stimulants and psychedelics. This is not in Critterding. The end result is a high-color cellular automaton running on a substrate that thinks and evolves, and may actually produce hallucinations in the user."

Comments

Re:design geekery

[Ethanol-fueled]

Have you ever painted a picture with your menstrual blood? You should try it.

It fades to a silvery-crimson sheen, like metallic paint does, due to the iron content of the blood. I still get all misty-eyed when I think about her giving me that painting. I framed it and put it on my desk at work. They thought I was a weirdo. Fuck them. She even kept my semen in a test tube, stored in her freezer next to the Hot Pockets.

Giving a menstrual blood painting is the ultimate expression of love -- short of cannibalism, at least :)

Re:One or the other

[blackcoot]

the latter. the former would require, amongst other things, access to the source code (as required by the original critterdings license) and a lot of noise coming from the biological disciplines re: computationally tractable, useful models for the various signaling pathways involved in hallucinogen use.