visualisation – dave's blog of art and programming

Robot nightjar eggshibition at the Poly, Falmouth

As part of this year’s Fascinate festival we took over the bar at Falmouth’s Poly with visualisations of the camouflage pattern evolution process from the egglab game.

This was a chance to do some detective work on the massive amount of genetic programming data we’ve amassed over the last few months, figure out ways to visualise it and create large prints of the egg pattern generation process. I selected family trees of eggs where mutations caused new features that made them difficult for people to spot, and thus resulted in large numbers of descendants. Then I printed examples of the eggs at different stages to see how they progressed through the generations.

We also ran the egglab game in the gallery on a touch screen which accidentally coincided with some great coverage in the Guardian and Popular Science, but the game kept running (most of the time) despite this.

The Poly (or Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society) was really the perfect place for this exhibition, with its 175 year history of promoting scientists, engineers and artists and encouraging innovation by getting them together in different ways. Today this seems very modern (and would be given one of our grand titles like ‘cross-displinary’) but it’s quite something to see that in a lot of ways the separation between these areas is currently bigger than it ever has been, and all the more urgent because of this. The Poly has some good claims to fame, being the first place Alfred Nobel demonstrated nitroâ€glycerine in 1865! Here are some pages from the 1914 report, a feel for what was going on a century ago amongst other radical world changes:

Computation is weaving

With my mind on our upcoming AHRC weave/code project (and seeing as Alex has already started writing code) I thought I’d have a go at visualising how computers work in relation to pattern manipulation. These screenshots are from a ZX Spectrum where I’ve modified some library assembler code for higher level arithmetic to display the contents of 7 CPU z80 registers graphically between each instruction – time runs from top to bottom.

Most processors don’t actually have circuits for mathematics, they simply implement ‘add’ along with bitwise instructions for ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘xor’ and a handful of instructions for shifting the bits left and right. This is true even with modern CPU’s where the arithmetic instructions for multiply, divide etc are built with hidden ‘microcode’ routines. For this reason the underlying operation of a computer has more to do with patterns than it does with concepts such as language or even numbers as we normally think of them.

The simplest (and shortest) are multiply in 8 bits. In this function, the ‘a’ register contains one number and the ‘h’ register contains the other – at the end the ‘a’ register contains the result. In the first screenshot the numbers are fairly simple so it’s possible to see what’s going on (ie. in 1*1 the ‘a’ and ‘h’ registers both contain 00000001)

170 in 8 bits looks like ‘10101010’ so easy to see – here are some different ways of reaching the same answer:

16bit multiply operates over 2 registers – the first value is stored in ‘h’ and ‘l’ and the other is on the stack, but is loaded into ‘d’ and ‘e’ after a few instructions:

43690 is ‘1010101010101010’ so in the first run here we multiply it by one as a test:

Some 16 bit divides – these take a longer time to calculate, so a whole page for all the instructions involved, and I have no idea how this works:

65535 is the largest value we can store, divide by itself to end up with 1:

The code for all this is here.

GX: Player activity animation

Four months of players picking, planting and sending gift fruit to spirits and each other compressed into nearly 7 minutes. If you’ve had a go recently, I hope you see yourself in a starring role! It’s super to see the ebb and flow of players, and explosions of activity around the focus tests.

Germination X player activity viz

The rendering of the whole thing is taking a long time, but here is a shot from a visualisation of player activity from Germination X showing picking, planting and gifts from players to each other or plant spirits. You can display a lot more sprites with fluxus than in a browser!