Nice work! Your inspired-by-Sims collection is the best I've seen in that genre, I think. I always look when someone links to their genetic images because I once made some too: https://djb.deviantart.com/gallery/ (They were less garish at the original gamma setting, that's how long ago it was.)

It always felt like there's more potential in this direction. Maybe with a magic sprinkling of neural nets?

Hey thank you!! Yours look great too. I know what you mean about gamma, mine were probably a little more washed out 15 years ago, I accidentally made them a bit gamma-proof I think. ;) I’m dying to find the time to do a JavaScript+WebGL version of this that other people can play with.

The big thing I spent time on was animating cross-fades between evolved expressions. I’ll send a link to the vid & paper if you’re interested.

I'd be interested, thanks.

A web version would make a great time-waster. At least as the author I wound up spending much more time clicking through the space of images than working on the code; it might perhaps not feel as compelling without the feeling of getting something for almost nothing when your own program comes to life.

Here they are. Yeah, I agree with you, a big piece of the enjoyment was writing the code, and then being surprised by what happened while exploring the image space. You definitely don't have as much love for the surprises in someone else's program, not knowing what it's expected to do or how it works. At least one year I was working on this I spent more time using it than coding it, and it was pretty educational and productive to be more of a user.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLmtvIt6ihA

http://dahart.com/paper/hart_evomusart_2007_paper.pdf

http://dahart.com/paper/hart_evomusart_2007_slides.pdf

BTW, Karl Sims read this paper and recommended it for Siggraph, but a few other reviewers were fairly opposed to generative art papers. C'est la vie.

Wow, the cross-fades really sell it. I never even tried to do anything like that; my genetic programs were for a kind-of-weird stack machine as the easiest thing to do. https://github.com/darius/tusdl/blob/master/evo.c

Slightly related to the starting topic of learned exploits: op_hwb_color() producing most of the colors seems to have suffered from some undefined or implementation-defined behavior -- I couldn't reproduce old pictures when I came back to this many years later. Yet that one misbehavior deserves a lot of the credit for whatever aesthetic value turned up. C'est encore la vie.

> The article's philosophical discussion of "surprise" feels a little klunky and academic to me

To me it sounded like something a referee would request or something they suspected a referee would request.