So I thought I'd take a moment and explain a project I'm working on
outside of the academic setting. In our Interface Major Studio,
we were tasked with making 50 boxes from a set pattern. We didn't
have to physically construct all of them, but the pattern I was
assigned turned out to be really simple. My idea for creating the
whole batch was to list out the attributes that people responded to:
color, opacity, and size. Then I worked out a scheme to get that
info encoded in an 8-bit number, 0 through 255. So the first bit
is red/not-red, the second blue/not-blue, etc. I was able to come
up with a pretty impressive range of boxes.
In the first round, I generated 16 of the little bastards and then went
around home and school, asking people to pick eight they liked. I
tallied all the responses, picked the 8 most selected, and "bred" a new
generation by feeding in their "genomes" (remember, numbers in the 0
through 255 range) into a python script. The script then mates
each one with another random winner and produces 8 more boxes.
Then I take the 8 winners and their 8 children (16 total) and do
another survey. So on and so forth.
I've just run the script to make a fourth generation. So far,
"clear" boxes are extinct, they definitely tend to be smaller, and
green is a small percentage of the pool, though it might be
growing. Not sure what the final result will be, but it's been an
interesting experiment.