Information about Evolutionary Art

Question

I have begun to do some research about Evolutionary Art algorithm. I read a lot of documents about it. But it seems not easy to understand. The website http://picbreeder.com is a great example for this. But I don't need this in the beginning because it is too complex. Where can I find some simple code about this in Java? I think read code could help me much. Thanks!!!

Answer 1

"Evolutionary Design by Computers" By David Bentley (amazon) has a couple of chapters on evolutionary art. However i dont think it includes any code / pseudocode. The canonical GA should do all you need, however the termination condition could be tricky as art is a subjective subject. (Not objective and therefore enumerable)

Hope this helps...

Answer 2

It looks like the EJC library might help you out, and it looks like a number of open source projects/tools come up if you Google for "java evolutionary computing."

I don't know how simple it is, and believe me it needs to be cleaned up a bit, but I have something that might get you started at https://github.com/murmux/Evo/tree/master/assignment2c It doesn't deal with art, rather game theory, but you can use it under the terms of the GPLv3 if you'd like. That uses Genetic Programming... I have another example using a more vanilla EA I might put up later.

Instead of evolving programs to play "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma," you would evolve programs to generate an art work. The fun part is coming up with a way to "score" an image for its fitness. (Although Picbreeder seems to skip scoring by having you pick the mating pool directly...)

Answer 3

Check this app: EvoPic, its An evolutionary picture creator that uses Steady-State Genetic Algorithm, to produce evolutionary pictures by drawing uni-code characters in a picture box.

Example: