Regruntled.com

Here is a gallery of images from cellular automata.  These are 1-dimensional cellular automata, represented by a row pixels along the top of the image.  The vertical dimension represents time, with each row of pixels being derived from the row above it according to a set of rules.

Gold Trees, Cassia Fistula.

Mark Bauerlein thinks that young Americans are the dumbest generation ever, and he blames it all on the internet.  Specifically, he thinks teenagers are using the internet to communicate with other teenagers, as opposed to learning something.

I suspect that every generation thinks the next generation is a bunch of idiots, and blames it on something recent.  The internet, television, rock and roll, comic books… the technology changes but the story remains the same.

Poinciana, Delonix Regia, Flame of the Forest.

I’ve been experimenting with metrics for sudokus.  For example, in the image above, each color occurs once as the center of a 3-by-3 block, four times as a corner, and four times as a side. There are also no instances of squares of the same color being adjacent diagonally, which is allowed by the sudoku rules is the squares are in different 3-by-3 blocks, but which visually makes the distribution of that color seem less random.

My thinking is that images with certain properties are more esthetically pleasing than other images.  I have a computer program that generates sudokus, and I can plug in different metrics.  The metrics also restrict the number of sudokus generated to more manageable levels.  The image above is one of only 36, for example.  Runs with less restrictive metrics go into the tens of millions.

Hans Andersson built a Rubik’s cube solver built from a Lego Mindstorms kit. It spends about half the time reading the colors from the cube. Then it figures out the solution and solves the cube without looking at it again. Complete instructions and software are available.