Ant Colony Landscape
This last Halloween weekend I had the opportunity to give two presentations at a Chicago regional Mensa convention dubbed Halloweem, held at the Westin in Wheeling IL. The two presentations I gave were
It was a very enjoyable experience for me, made all the better by the inquisitiveness of the audience. The only downside was that I over indulged in the convention’s great food offerings. Also speaking at the convention was Kent Nebergall. Kent and I are both members of the Chicago Society for Space Studies Speakers Bureau. Curiously neither of us were giving space exploration presentations at the convention.
Shortly I’ll be leaving for the Windycon Science Fiction Convention being held at Westin Lombard Yorktown Center in Lombard IL. While I won’t be giving any presentations this year, I will be participating in some panels. The panels are:
- Space Seconds which is a panel covering space missions that were not the first of their kind, but the second.
- Pluto Update is a panel addressing the findings of the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
- Autographing was to be an autographing session that I am forced to cancel as my book on algorithmic art is not yet available.
- Why Social Media Sucks takes a look at the world of social media, both from a operational perspective as well as a communicational perspective.
- Art Media is a panel that I’ll be moderating on how artists decide on their artistic media and the strengths and weaknesses of each media.
As noted above, I originally agreed to do an autograph session at a time when I thought that I would have print copies of my book The Beauty of Algorithmic Art available. However, in searching for a publishing platform I wound up discarding my original two finalists (Blurb and Lulu). I have investigated several additional vendors and am currently focusing on Bookbaby and IngramSpark.
In addition to participating in the panels identified above, I will also have several artworks in the convention’s art show.
This Post’s Illustration
While working on a program to implement an ant colony simulation, I discovered that I had a program that did a nice job of simulating natural media painting. The landscape image Ant Colony Landscape is the result of an initial test of a program where the ants sample an underlying photograph and paint their trail. I must point out that this output was generated during an early stage of the program’s development. Coding was done using the Processing framework. The motto of the story is that sometimes algorithms can take you to surprising destinations. For more information about ant colony optimization, see the Wikipedia entry on ant colony optimization algorithms.
