L-Systems, Elm Puzzle Generator, and Skia

#084 Creative Coding / Generative Newsletter

Good Afternoon Friends,

Saturday I spent most of the day simply using the plotter and plotting various gifts but also to send out. A week ago, I had written a little L-system algorithm in Javascript and exporting the results in SVG using Paper.js. Generally L-Systems will be used to create trees, leaves, and other rule based. I used it to build snowflake like creations. A great book available online about how and what can be done with these systems is called The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants that I had pointed out in the very first issue of the newsletter here. It’s free online so I would highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t yet seen it.

I hope you have a great week!

Chris Ried

Tutorials & Articles

Writing a puzzle generator in Elm

Randomly generating puzzles is a nice problem for beginners and tinkerers, so I wanted to write up the approach that I came up with. I'd love to hear from you if you attempted to do something similar, especially if you came up with different solutions.

I used Elm, because it has a nice way to produce SVGs, and it happens to be the frontend language I know best.

Though I never have used Elm for any creative purposes, the article does a great job on providing code and image examples on creating their own puzzle generator.

Btw, if you are looking for any gifts with a generative spin and don’t have access to a laser cutter, Nervous Systems has a number of interesting puzzles gift ideas you should check out.

Interpreting Sensor Data for MIDI Velocity in Max

This is an answer to a discord of Philip Meyer. The question was asking how can one take sensor data and convert it to MIDI data in order to to create some interesting use cases in Max.

The Physics of Butterfly Wings

Some butterflies have shiny, vividly colored wings. From different angles you see different colors. This effect is called iridescence. How does it work?

It turns out these butterfly wings are made of very fancy materials! Light bounces around inside these materials in a tricky way. Sunlight of different colors winds up reflecting off these materials in different directions.

How I learned to Speak Human

What happens when a computer science major steps out of MIT and into design, business, and leadership? In “How I Learned To Speak Human After Leaving MIT :-),” I’ll share how leaving the Media Lab in 2008 set me on an unexpected path—from advocating for the arts with the STEAM movement at RISD to navigating venture capital, startups, and industries of all scales. Does being a multidisciplinary “hybrid” thinker and doer enhance or limit one’s career prospects?

How I really think this resonated so much because it resonates many of the quotes I highlighted in the last newsletter.

Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction

Great overview of the tutorial creating the BZ-Reaction in p5… you can learn alot about the simulation of the reaction here.

Wodinak - Creative Developer Profile

Really this is a site that has alot of interesting frontend techniques built into it and definitely thought it is worth highlighting the experience. I have to say that Antoine Wodniack has some incredible motion graphics experience to make the following happen.

Skia Canvas

Skia Canvas is a browser-less implementation of the HTML Canvas drawing API for Node.js. It is based on Google’s Skia graphics engine and, accordingly, produces very similar results to Chrome’s <canvas> element. The library is well suited for use on desktop machines where you can render hardware-accelerated graphics to a window and on the server where it can output a variety of image formats.

The following is actually an interesting alternative to things like p5 or processing for it’s ability to work outside of the browser and being able to use it in the browser.

Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All Over Nature

How few corners can a shape have and still tile the plane?” mathematician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple question was about the geometry of tilings, also called tessellations—arrangements of shapes, called tiles or cells, that fill a surface with no gaps or overlaps. Humans have a preoccupation with tessellation that dates back at least to ancient Sumer, where tilings featured prominently in architecture and art. But in all the centuries that thinkers have tinkered with tiles, no one seems to have seriously pondered whether there’s some limit to how few vertices—sharp corners where lines meet—the tiles of a tessellation can have. Until Domokos. Chasing tiles with ever fewer corners eventually led him and his small team to discover an entirely new type of shape.

Book: Generating Sound and Organizing Time

Generating Sound & Organizing Time is about the astonishing things you can do—and the insights you can find—when you work at the atomic sample-by-sample structure of digital audio.bWhether you are a musician, sound designer, composer, or an experimentalist interested in creating music and tools to generate and modulate audio, our aim is to reveal how working at the sample level is not only easier to reason about, but also far more open to demystify and unleash the immense possibilities of digital audio signal processing.

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