Programming, Topic: Generative Art

Recent posts (Page 3 of 9)

Genuary 2026.11: Quine

Genuary 2026.11: Quine

2026-01-11 in Programming

11) Quine

Making a genart quine? That’s… certainly a thing!

So basically I made a very simple stack based virtual machine. You can check the source code below for what commands it can actually run. It will then run until it outputs enough code to match the input length (or times out). If it happens to output a quine? Woot!

If not, it will randomly mutate and try again.

  • cellSize - Change how big the program is (default is 10, theoretically with semi quines size shouldn’t matter)
  • ticksPerFrame - How fast the simulation will run
  • asFastAsPossible - Ignore the above and run an entire simulation per frame (it could technically go even faster 😄)
  • pauseAfter - Pause to see what happened after output is done or a break
  • stopAfter - When a single program has run, stop the main loop (mostly useful for debugging)
  • randomizePercent - How much of the input to randomly change for the next iteration
  • runOutput - Run the output as the next program (otherwise, randomize the input)
  • highlightActive - Highlight the parts of the program that actually ran (brighter colors)
  • allowSemiQuine - Ignore non-active parts of the program when considering a quine (if you copied the output to the program in these parts, they’d be a quine, so I think it counts)
  • allowReadingCode - Allow (new) commands that allow reading our own source code
  • allowWritingCode - Allow (new) commands that can modify the code you were originally running
  • debugPrint - Print each command run/output to console.log for debugging
  • debugSlow - Drops the framerate to 1 fps for debugging
  • debugStepButton - Add a ‘step’ button that runs one step at a time (noLoop) for debugging (reload the page)

In addition, you can put in code in the box and ’load’ it to run. This will be helpful to verify quines! I have some interesting code below (including a hand written quine! That uses the self reading instructions).

If you manage to find a quine organically (or write one), I’d love to hear what it was!

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Genuary 2026.09: Cellular automata

Genuary 2026.09: Cellular automata

2026-01-09 in Programming

9) Cellular automata

Just a bunch of random rules, with the ability (if you put this in p5js at least) to add them pretty easily.

This one can do some wacky things if you randomize it. But also, it might crash your browser tab on some of these settings. Sorry. 😄

Try:

  • Perlin, Max, fuzz, diffuse

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Genuary 2026.07: Boolean algebra

Genuary 2026.07: Boolean algebra

2026-01-07 in Programming

5) Boolean algebra

So the basic idea here is to recursively divide the space. The black squares are the randomly chosen values. Then, for each level of the tree, combine the children using one of the selected functions (and/or/xor/etc), drawing a border if the result of that combination is true.

Try various combinations of settings!

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Genuary 2026.03: Fibonacci forever

Genuary 2026.03: Fibonacci forever

2026-01-03 in Programming

3) Fibonacci forever

Fibonacci

This is entirely based around this Fibonacci generator function:

function makeFibber(maxValue = 1000) {
  let a = 1;
  let b = 1;
  return () => {
    let n = a + b;
    a = b;
    b = n;
    if (b > maxValue) {
      a = 1;
      b = 1;
    }
    return a;
  };
}

Make a fibber and then just keep calling it for next values.

All sorts of exciting options here!

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