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Russian ASCII Art Animated Cat From 1968

Posted by timothy on from the doing-it-the-hard-way dept.

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."

4 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Rotoscoped. by wiredlogic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It isn't rotoscoped. You can see the skeletonized cat toward the middle of the video. You can also make out some cracks where the different components meet at the joints.

    --
    I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
  2. Re:ASCII? by badran · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What do tits have to do with this?

    PS: A-SCIISKI, sounds a lot like "What about the tits?".

  3. Flash? by DarwinSurvivor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  4. Re:ASCII? by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I like a positive system of transliteration, ambiguity sucks :-/

    If you can't live with ambiguity, I suggest you avoid communicating with humans.

    I find it more practical to live with the fact that language is an evolving entity. That means:

    • acknowledging that conflicting sets of "rules" (conventions) exist and there's nothing you can do about it
    • learn to adapt to whatever "rules" happen to be in use
    • refrain from criticizing "illiterate" people who don't use exactly the same rules as you
    • embrace the creativity and beauty of language as it exists outside textbooks!