by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
(from the archive)
There are many ways Artificial Intelligences might create art. Breeding a colony of virtual ants is one of the most creative.
Photogrowth from the University of Coimbra does exactly that. The basic idea is to take an image and paint an abstract version of it. Normally you would paint with brush strokes. In ant paintings you paint with the trails of hundreds of ants as they crawl over the picture, depositing ink rather than the normal chemical trails ants use to guide other ants to food. The colours in the original image act as food for the ants, which absorb energy from its bright parts. They then use up energy as they move around. They die if they don’t find enough food, but reproduce if they have lots. The results are highly novel swirl-filled pictures.
The program uses vector graphics rather than pixel-based approaches. In pixel graphics, an image is divided into a grid of squares and each allocated a colour. That means when you zoom in to an area, you just see larger squares, not more detail. With vector graphics, the exact position of the line followed is recorded. That line is just mapped on to the particular grid of the display when you view it. The more pixels in the display, the more detailed the trail is drawn. That means you can zoom in to the pictures and just see ever more detail of the ant trails that make them up.
You become a breeder of a species of ant
that produce trails, and so images,
you will find pleasing
Because the virtual ants wander around at random, each time you run the program you will get a different image. However, there are lots of ways to control how ants can move around their world. Exploring the possibilities by hand would only ever uncover a small fraction of the possibilities. Photogrowth therefore uses a genetic algorithm. Rather than set all the options of ant behaviour for each image, you help design a fitness function for the algorithm. You do this by adjusting the importance of different aspects like the thickness of trail left and the extent the ants will try and cover the whole canvas. In effect you become a breeder of a species of ant that produce trails, and so images, you will find pleasing. Once you’ve chosen the fitness function, the program evolves a colony of ants based on it, and they then paint you a picture with their trails.
The result is a painting painted by ants bred purely to create images that please you.
More on …
- The photogrowth ant painting site [EXTERNAL]
- Mini-beasts and Computer Science [PORTAL]
- Ant track algorithms
- Sabine Hauert: Swarm Engineer
- A Storm in a Bell Jar
Related Magazines …
- Issue 4 – Computer Science and Biolife
- Issue 18 – Machines that are creative
- Issue 22 – Creative computing
- Biology loves technology
EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1, and through EP/K040251/2 held by Professor Ursula Martin.
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