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Russian ASCII Art Animated Cat From 1968
harrymcc writes "Forty-two years ago, Russian scientists created an impressive sequence of a cat walking about — and it was all the more impressive given that the 'CGI' involved rendering hundreds of images of the cat as ASCII art, then printing out the sequence image by image and photographing it."
...lolcats turn 42.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Since ASCII stands for "American" Standard Code for Information Interchange I think the Soviets who created this might be offended.
I tried and failed.
Can someone please post a more direct link? (or possibly just the ascii)
aren't we all tired of looking for the article in a link in the article in a link in the article in a...
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
AWESOME.
Endut! Hoch hech!
A year later, American scientists created an impressive sequence of a man walking about the lunar surface...
There is a well done documentary on archive.org
The guy interviewed Vinton Cerf and Philip J. Kaplan for it, amongst others you will likely recognize.
http://www.archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary
iirc, part 5 was all about the ascii art scene.
This is of course neat to see, but I think it's clearly a rotoscoped sequence transferred to a printout (which is pretty cool too). Not to quibble, but this might be a better example of full-on ASCII animation:
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ - The classic ASCII anim of Episode IV.
The internet is made of cats
/. cat thread!
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
I think this is very fun, but it looks like they could have used some help from basic understanding of pin registration. The animations are awesome. The jumpiness of some of it is not.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
One assumes this was printed on the Model-KI teletype, aka the KITTY.
Anybody want a peanut?
RUSKY ART more apropriate
..."Worker and Parasite"?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyxYdj9dGcI
You mean like hand painting 160,000+ cels and then photographing them? To create 90 minute feature length films?
If I'm not mistaken, Disney and Warner Brothers, to name two, were doing that long before 1964.
This is somehow special because it was "CGI" -- ASCII or KOI-8 art printed out and photographed?
Bah. Go ahead, mod me down, but I"m unimpressed.
See that? First pass he was cool. On the second, he was all skinny and shit. Third pass was the ghost. Call the ASPCA!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Impressive would have been two consecutive hits on the cat with a railgun...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubDqdV2r9k
You Linux types try "apropos aalib", then try the programs listed in a console. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Could it be possible to reproduce copies of the original ascii art printouts by playing back the video using mplayer and aalib video out?
In Soviet Russian, LOLcats animate YOU!
...Russian scientists with access to a computer smoked some pot.
The cat seems to be heavily quantised. At last we have a picture of Schrödingers cat!
And correct.
Too bad I have no points to give today.
Molodets.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Actually, that was Soviet time. Not Russian. Its unfair to the people that contributed to the film to call it Russian.
That was when the video was uploaded.
Holy old news.
Not to say that it isn't good though, it was pretty awesome.
Shit, there goes my patent for "animation via block arrangement and sequencing...with a computer"
A more appropriate name would be Catscii.
How were the images generated? Was it just hand-edited text files that were printed out, or did they have some type of drawing program? It would be cool if they had created a program with a 3d model of the cat - an animation of which was then rendered to ASCII :) I suppose it would have been possible given the technology at the time but also quite challenging - who knows :)
not that sophisticated even by 1967 standards. Observe this bell labs video from the same era.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXYXuHVTS_k&feature=related
There's a lot of Russian surnames that end in -sky. Some are of Polish origin, like Dostoevsky, some Ukrainian (Tchaikovsky), some are purebred Russian (Kandisky, Kluchevsky, ...),
The animation is interesting, but it's not really ASCII art. Not as I define it. ASCII art in my books is using the particular characteristics (shape & density) of many different alphanumeric characters and symbols together to make an image. This is just the same character repeated over and over. Whether or not the animation of the outline was "rotoscoped" from a real cat, the ASCII part was certainly "rotoscoped" from a conventional animation and simply filled in with a letter. It could have been done with a pencil outline on a sheet of paper put into a typewriter.
This is a lot of work, certainly, but it's not at all technically or even really artistically challenging, even by 1968 standards.
Text art has been around for a long time. Typewriter art for over 100 years. RTTY art nearly as long. The principles of animation have been understood for a while. Why is this news?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Russians? 1968? ASCII? Really??
In the late 60's or early 70's Mad magazine had a few pages of cartoons ("art"?) made on a typewriter. One that struck me was a rocket, looking something like this: A H H I (imagine it in Courier ...)
A few years later I had a BASIC programming class, and when we finally got a few CRTs (to replace the printout only outputs we had previously) one of the first things I did, now that things could really "move"!, was to write a program to make this Ascii rocket take off! I remember showing it off to others in the class.
But, alas, this discovery from 1968 means I can no longer claim to be "the father of computer animation." Oh well, it was time for new business cards anyway ...
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
clealry it states they had physic and math guys working on this. besides the torso doesnt move up and down. and why the wire frame skeleton?
its quite likely they simulated the physics of motion then generated the ani from that.
Thanks for pointing that out, that makes it much more interesting an achievement. These folks surely could foresee the future of computer animation, except there is no cat
Notice that sometimes the columns of type gaps between them or are run together. This printer wasn't nearly as well made as the American behemoths of the sixties.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
So in 1968, the russians take a bunch of standard characters, print them out onto paper and film it. 42 years later the Americans spend millions of dollars creating a convoluted ineficient browser plugin (flash) in order to display it.
Reminds me of a certain expensive pen...
There is an ASCII screen saver and it is hella cool! Get it hear for Mac and KDE and maybe windows, I didn't look that hard.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
How many of us did a similar "brief animation project" in BASIC on an Apple II, TI-99/4A, or Coleco for a 7th-12th grade project back in the early to mid 80's?
Granted, it wasn't on paper, but still... I did a four minute graphic story on an Apple II in 8th grade back in ... math math years .. 1983ish that this reminded me of.
Not my fault the dirty reds were 15 years ahead of me. These guys were all PhDs and shit.
Still got an A... bah.
I got an attempted ZBot install upon going to that page.
Puzzle Daze is now my job
They used differential equations to simulate the cat motion, its not rotoscoping or keyframe animation. Very ahead of its time.
Here is the original paper:
http://www.etudes.ru/ru/mov/kittie/koshechka.djvu
Can anyone translate this to English?