next up previous
Next: RULES FOR MAKING LEGAL Up: LOW-COMPLEXITY ART Previous: LOW-COMPLEXITY DESIGN

FRACTAL CIRCLES FOR CODING DRAWINGS

The fractal coding scheme I introduce here is general enough for designing arbitrary drawings. It is also sophisticated enough to allow for specification of non-trivial drawings with a limited amount of information. Finally, it is simple enough to be implemented by a short algorithm and to be taught quickly to a typical human observer.

The ancient Greeks considered the circle to be the ideal two- dimensional geometric form. Without necessarily agreeing with the Greeks I have used circles as the basis for designing drawings. One reason is that a circle can be drawn by a very short algorithm. Another reason is that circles are something most humans can relate to: most people know something about circles and their properties. These reasons make it easy to explain the algorithmic simplicity of the drawing to a typical observer (and thus achieve Goal 2b).

Sizes and relative positions of ``legal" circles will be greatly limited by the following set of fractal rules.



 

Juergen Schmidhuber
1998-06-04

Back to Theory of Beauty page
Back to Algorithmic Information page