Palette Swapping

2014-12-23

Today’s task comes from the Code Golf StackExchange. The idea behind code golf is to write a program with as few characters as possible, often rendering the code nigh on unreadable. Luckily, the same StackExchange also host popularity contests, one of which is the inspiration behind today’s post:

You are given two true color images, the Source and the Palette. They do not necessarily have the same dimensions but it is guaranteed that their areas are the same, i.e. they have the same number of pixels. Your task is to create an algorithm that makes the most accurate looking copy of the Source by only using the pixels in the Palette. Each pixel in the Palette must be used exactly once in a unique position in this copy. The copy must have the same dimensions as the Source. – American Gothic in the palette of Mona Lisa: Rearrange the pixels

Clockception

2014-11-04

Let’s talk about clocks.

We can draw traditional analog clocks¹:

We can draw nice digital clocks:

┌─┐  │ │ ─┐ ┌─┐
│ │└─┤    │ │ │
└─┘  │ │ ─┴─└─┘

Or we can go downright mad and make clocks out of clocks:

Even animated!

Tile Puzzle

2014-10-28

It’s been a while¹, but I’m back. Today’s post is inspired by a post from /r/dailyprogrammer almost a month ago now: Challenge #183 [Intermediate] Edge Matching Tile Puzzle. Basically, we’re going to solve puzzles like this:

If you look carefully, the tiles are the same between the two, although they might be rotated.

Regular Expression Fractals

2014-10-05

Oops, turns out I haven’t had a post in a good long while. Before it gets even longer, I figure that I should take one off my backlog and just write it up, even if it is a little on the shorter side.

Today’s post was inspired by this post on /r/dailyprogrammer a month ago today: Challenge #178 [Hard] Regular Expression Fractals. The basic idea is that you are going to take a rectangular region and divide it into four quadrants, again and again, recording the path as you go (images from that post):

Invader Fractals

2014-09-17

First we had Procedural Invaders. Then we used them fill up space with Fractal Invaders. But we’re not quite done yet! This time, let’s mix things up a bit and make Invader Fractals.

Fractal Invaders

2014-09-16

Today’s post is a follow up to Sunday’s post Procedural Invaders. This time around, we’re going to work through two different space filling algorithms in order to eventually generate something like this:

Procedural Invaders

2014-09-14

Today’s post comes from a long line of ‘inspired by posts’ all pretty much leading back (so far as I can tell) to this post by j.tarbell: invader.procedural from 2003.

The basic idea is that we want to generate ‘invaders’ in the style of space invaders. Except we don’t want 10 or 20, we want tens of thousands. So how do we do it? Well, take a look at this:

Braille unicode pixelation

2014-05-30

What would you do if you were on a machine that had no higher level graphics, but you still wanted to display images?

Quadtree image compression

2014-05-28

About two weeks ago, I came across a post via /r/programming: Quadtree Art^(src). In a sentence, the goal is to recursively divide an image into a quadtree, at each step expanding the current node with the largest internal variance.

Brownian trees

2014-03-11

Pretty pretty picture time¹: