You have new mail. % finger qarl@ecl.wustl.edu Login: qarl Name: Karl Stiefvater Directory: /home/qarl Shell: /bin/tcsh Plan: Ode to the Forgotten Dotfiles In the terminal’s quiet cathedral, dim-lit, Where prompts blink soft like candlelit wit, Once lived the files, the sacred, the terse — A .plan, a .forward, the UNIXverse. .login would whisper, .cshrc would […]
A Universe That Must Be Lived, Not Solved: Determinism, Free Will, and Computational Irreducibility
The Clockwork Universe and the Fear of Determinism For centuries, the universe has been imagined as a grand clockwork governed by elegant equations. In this classical view, if one knew all the initial conditions and laws—like a vast celestial equation—the future could be calculated with certainty. Laplace famously described an intellect (later dubbed Laplace’s demon) […]
complete
chatGPT is Turing complete. why? because it can run BASIC, and BASIC is Turing complete. for example, this slightly skewed Fibonacci sequence: and it works.
you
i asked an AI to draw itself.
handmade (?) gifts (!) for the holidays
1. take a picture of someone you love: 2. take a picture of some of your scribbles: 3. use my super new app pikazo to draw your friend using your scribbles: 4. print on fancy wood/glass/paper and give! 5. utilize any and all refrigerator art for everyone you love!
prez
continuing in my explorations of image generation with neural networks – i present the presidents of the united states of america, rendered as if by Picasso, in Picasso’s various styles. many thanks to Matt McFarland for the inspiration and nice writeup.
P1K4Z0
i have Picasso’s brain in a vat. (please don’t ask me how i got it.) if you’ve seen those trippy hallucination videos, it’s kinda like that: i have his virtual visual cortex inside my computer. but instead of putting eyeballs inside armpits – he paints. if you send me your picture at qarl@qarl.com, i’ll force […]
002
our second session has come and gone, somewhat successfully i think – things always go better when your audience is armed. we covered implicit surfaces, renderman/pixie, displacement shaders, and more of my wacky cellular simulation. the turnout was pretty good too. if you’d like to attend the next one, or just receive updates, drop me […]
001
once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, i taught a class called “computational art”. today, thanks to the miracle of the interwebs, i am able to teach once again. (be warned, the words “class” and “teach” here are used in the loosest possible sense.) here is my first attempt – an exploration […]
caves reloaded
i just finished a VERY fun podcast interview about the caves (and procedural art in general) with the “brooklyn is watching” folk. if you’ve got a few minutes to kill, Karl-Bob sez check it out.
care and feeding of cave systems
after much wailing and gnashing of teeth – i am the proud owner of a brand new island sim. thank you Fritz Linden. so now i’m breeding caves. yeah. breeding caves. welcome to our brave new world. anyway, if you want your caves to turn out any good – you need to pick a fitness […]
the blimps are alive
those who follow the story of the blimps know that the grid is a very dangerous place. some parcels are full. some parcels have scripts turned off. some parcels have owners who viciously murder the blimps. each of these perils (and others) kill the blimps in their tracks. to compensate, the blimps reproduce themselves when […]