Month: October 2013

Open Sauces

Open sauces is a FoAM project to investigate the sharing of food, food culture and food systems. Last week in Brussels we started experimenting with ways to store, display and reason about recipes in different ways. Taking the recipes from the Open Sauces book we’re representing them as Petri Nets, which means we can feed them into various different visualisations, from Scheme Bricks – taken from the Naked on Pluto’s gallery installation projection:

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To a new brand new circular representation:

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These structures are filtered somewhat to be more readable than the raw petri nets, which can be rendered via graphviz for debugging:

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Visualising egg pattern genomes

A couple of screenshots from the upcoming Project Nightjar citizen science game – the genetic programming pattern generator is now working in a simple test framework, and even with myself as the only player at the moment, it’s gradually producing eggs that are harder and harder to find against one of the background images from the field site in South Africa. Today I’ve been working on a viewer for the pattern genome itself, which displays all the base images and the operations and intermediate steps as it builds up the final image. Unlike any natural form of genetics, genetic programming is all about growing trees of functions connected together, and here we are interested in combining simple images using HTML5 canvas’s composite operations to make complex patterns.

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This will be useful for debugging mutations, where the sub-trees are jumbled up, but as we’re building a citizen science game, we’re also going to be exposing as much as possible about how it’s working – from the game mechanics like this to the underlying camouflage theories we’ll be testing. If you recognise the graph drawing algorithm, I’ve been plundering a long forgotten project: fastbreeder.