Category: issue 22 – Creative Computing

The Hive at Kew

Art meets bees, science and electronics

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

(from the archive)

a boy lying in the middle of the Hive at Kew Gardens.

Combine an understanding of science, with electronics skills and the creativity of an artist and you can get inspiring, memorable and fascinating experiences. That is what the Hive, an art instillation at Kew Gardens in London, does. It is a massive sculpture linked to a subtle sound and light experience, surrounded by a wildflower meadow, but based on the work of scientists studying bees.

The Hive is a giant aluminium structure that represents a bee hive. Once inside you see it is covered with LED lights that flicker on and off apparently randomly. They aren’t random though, they are controlled by a real bee hive elsewhere in the gardens. Each pulse of a light represents bees communicating in that real hive where the artist Wolfgang Buttress placed accelerometers. These are simple sensors like those in phones or a BBC micro:bit that sense movement. The sensitive ones in the bee hive pick up vibrations caused by bees communicating with each other The signals generated are used to control lights in the sculpture.

A new way to communicate

This is where the science comes in. The work was inspired by Martin Bencsik’s team at Nottingham Trent University who in 2011 discovered a new kind of communication between bees using vibrations. Before bees are about to swarm, where a large part of the colony split off to create a new hive, they make a specific kind of vibration, as they prepare to leave. The scientists discovered this using the set up copied by Wolfgang Buttress, using accelerometers in bee hives to help them understand bee behaviour. Monitoring hives like this could help scientists understand the current decline of bees, not least because large numbers of bees die when they swarm to search for a new nest.

Hear the vibrations through your teeth

Good vibrations

The Kew Hive has one last experience to surprise you. You can hear vibrations too. In the base of the Hive you can listen to the soundtrack through your teeth. Cover your ears and place a small coffee stirrer style stick between your teeth, and put the other end of the stick in to a slot. Suddenly you can hear the sounds of the bees and music. Vibrations are passing down the stick, through your teeth and bones of your jawbone to be picked up in a different way by your ears.

A clever use of simple electronics has taught scientists something new and created an amazing work of art.

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A hoverfly on a leaf

EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1, and through EP/K040251/2 held by Professor Ursula Martin. 

Hoverflies: comin’ to get ya

by Peter W McOwan and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

(from the archive)

A hoverfly on a blade of grass

By understanding the way hoverflies mate, computer scientists found a way to sneak up on humans, giving a way to make games harder.

When hoverflies get the hots for each other they make some interesting moves. Biologists had noticed that as one hoverfly moves towards a second to try and mate, the approaching fly doesn’t go in a straight line. It makes a strange curved flight. Peter and his student Andrew Anderson thought this was an interesting observation and started to look at why it might be. They came up with a cunning idea. The hoverfly was trying to sneak up on its prospective mate unseen.

The route the approaching fly takes matches the movements of the prospective mate in such a way that, to the mate, the fly in the distance looks like it’s far away and ‘probably’ stationary.

Tracking the motion of a hoverfly and its sightlines

How does it do this? Imagine you are walking across a field with a single tree in it, and a friend is trying to sneak up on you. Your friend starts at the tree and moves in such a way that they are always in direct line of sight between your current position and the tree. As they move towards you they are always silhouetted against the tree. Their motion towards you is mimicking the stationary tree’s apparent motion as you walk past it… and that’s just what the hoverfly does when approaching a mate. It’s a stealth technique called ‘active motion camouflage’.

By building a computer model of the mating flies, the team were able to show that this complex behaviour can actually be done with only a small amount of ‘brain power’. They went on to show that humans are also fooled by active motion camouflage. They did this by creating a computer game where you had to dodge missiles. Some of those missiles used active motion camouflage. The missiles using the fly trick were the most difficult to spot.

It just goes to show: there is such a thing as a useful computer bug.

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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1, and through EP/K040251/2 held by Professor Ursula Martin. 

Ant Art

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

(from the archive)

The close up head of an ant staring at you
Image by Virvoreanu Laurentiu from Pixabay 

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.

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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1, and through EP/K040251/2 held by Professor Ursula Martin. 

Only the fittest slogans survive!

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

(From the archive)

Being creative isn’t just for the fun of it. It can be serious too. Marketing people are paid vast amounts to come up with slogans for new products, and in the political world, a good, memorable soundbite can turn the tide over who wins and loses an election. Coming up with great slogans that people will remember for years needs both a mastery of language and a creative streak too. Algorithms are now getting in on the act, and if anyone can create a program as good as the best humans, they will soon be richer than the richest marketing executive. Polona Tomašicˇ and her colleagues from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia are one group exploring the use of algorithms to create slogans. Their approach is based on the way evolution works – genetic algorithms. Only the fittest slogans survive!

A mastery of language

To generate a slogan, you give their program a short description on the slogan’s topic – a new chocolate bar perhaps. It then uses existing language databases and programs to give it the necessary understanding of language.

First, it uses a database of common grammatical links between pairs of words generated from wikipedia pages. Then skeletons of slogans are extracted from an Internet list of famous (so successful) slogans. These skeletons don’t include the actual words, just the grammatical relationships between the words. They provide general outlines that successful slogans follow.

From the passage given, the program pulls out keywords that can be used within the slogans (beans, flavour, hot, milk, …). It generates a set of fairly random slogans from those words to get started. It does this just by slotting keywords into the skeletons along with random filler words in a way that matches the grammatical links of the skeletons.

Breeding Slogans

New baby slogans are now produced by mating pairs of initial slogans (the parents). This is done by swapping bits into the baby from each parent. Both whole sections and individual words are swapped in. Mutation is allowed too. For example, adjectives are added in appropriate places. Words are also swapped for words with a related meaning. The resulting children join the new population of slogans. Grammar is corrected using a grammar checker.

Culling Slogans

Slogans are now culled. Any that are the same as existing ones go immediately. The slogans are then rated to see which are fittest. This uses simple properties like their length, the number of keywords used, and how common the words used are. More complex tests used are based on how related the meanings of the words are, and how commonly pairs of words appear together in real sentences. Together these combine to give a single score for the slogan. The best are kept to breed in the next generation, the worst are discarded (they die!), though a random selection of weaker slogans are also allowed to survive. The result is a new set of slogans that are slightly better than the previous set.

Many generations later…

Hot chocolate image by Sabrina Ripke from Pixabay

The program breeds and culls slogans like this for thousands, even millions of generations, gradually improving them, until it finally chooses its best. The slogans produced are not yet world beating on their own, and vary in quality as judged by humans. For chocolate, one run came up with slogans like “The healthy banana” and “The favourite oven”, for example. It finally settled on “The HOT chocolate” which is pretty good.

More work is needed on the program, especially its fitness function – the way it decides what is a good slogan and what isn’t. As it stands this sort of program isn’t likely to replace anyone’s marketing department. They could help with brainstorming sessions though, to spark new ideas but leaving humans to make the final choice. Supporting human creativity rather than replacing it is probably just as rewarding for the program after all.

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Issue 22 Cover Creative Computing

This article was originally published on CS4FN and also appears on p13 of Creative Computing, issue 22 of the CS4FN magazine. You can download a free PDF copy of the magazine as well as all of our previous booklets and magazines from the CS4FN downloads site.

Standup Robots

‘How do robots eat pizza?’… ‘One byte at a time’. Computational Humour is real, but it’s not jokes about computers, it’s computers telling their own jokes.

Robot performing
Image from istockphoto

Computers can create art, stories, slogans and even magic tricks. But can computers perform themselves? Can robots invent their own jokes? Can they tell jokes?

Combining Artificial Intelligence, computational linguistics and humour studies (yes you can study how to be funny!) a team of Scottish researchers made an early attempt at computerised standup comedy! They came up with Standup (System to Augment Non Speakers Dialogue Using Puns): a program that generates riddles for kids with language difficulties. Standup has a dictionary and joke-building mechanism, but does not perform, it just creates the jokes. You will have to judge for yourself as to whether the puns are funny. You can download the software from here. What makes a pun funny? It is a about the word having two meanings at exactly the same time in a sentence. It is also about generating an expectation that you then break: a key idea about what is at the core of creativity too.

A research team at Virginia Tech in the US created a system that started to learn about funny pictures. Having defined a ‘funniness score’ they created a computational model for humorous scenes, and trained it to predict funniness, perhaps with an eye to spotting pics for social media posting, or not.

But are there funny robots out there? Yes! RoboThespian programmed by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, and Data, created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are both robots programmed to do stand-up comedy. Data has a bank of jokes and responds to audience reaction. His developers don’t actually know what he will do when he performs, as he is learning all the time. At his first public gig, he got the crowd laughing, but his timing was poor. You can see his performance online, in a TED Talk.

RoboThespian did a gig at the London Barbican alongside human comedians. The performance was a live experiment to understand whether the robot could ‘work the audience’ as well as a human comedian. They found that even relatively small changes in the timing of delivery make a big difference to audience response.

What have these all got in common? Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and studies to understand what humour actually is, are being combined to make something that is funny. Comedy is perhaps the pinnacle of creativity. It’s certainly not easy for a human to write even one joke, so think how hard it is distill that skill into algorithms and train a computer to create loads of them.

You have to laugh!

Watch RoboThespian [EXTERNAL]

– Jane Waite, Queen Mary University of London, Summer 2017

Download Issue 22 of the cs4fn magazine “Creative Computing” here

Lots more computing jokes on our Teaching London Computing site