Previously I introduced the idea of a crowdsourced graphic that I would have my friends generate. The experiment is still happening, and I encourage everyone who got a token to participate (so far very few people actually submitted their pixels). If you didn’t get a token, but are subscribing to/occasionally reading/just stumbled on this blog, let me know and I’ll send you one. Similarly, if you used up your tokens, let me know. I don’t want the lack of pixels (or the fear to lose them) to be the reason why people don’t contribute.

The work so far is fun to look at; undisputedly predictable was the penis that found its way on the canvas a few hours after the game started, but there have been efforts to turn it into a happy face (I must admit, I was tempted to use up some of my tokens but in the end I decided this piece of art is a no judgment art and anything goes).

An interesting pattern was that people used the background image and the fact that the canvas was translucent to trace elements of the image onto the canvas. I did not expect that, but I guess that’s an as good place to start as any.

Finally, people are not taking advantage of the collaboration element of the game. I’ll let you in on a secret: the “bonus” you get for merging tokens is actually pretty substantial. In fact, the number of pixels you can set is equal to the “size” of the token (the first three digits) raised to the power 1.25. This may not seem much (it’s close to 1, after all), but consider merging two tokens, each of “size” 10. Each individual token allows you to set 10^1.25 = 18 pixels, so in total both tokens let you set 36 pixels. If you merge the tokens, you will get one token of size 20 and 20^1.25 = 42 (you’ve just gained 6 pixels). The differences are even larger for larger tokens (or more tokens). Two tokens of size 20 give you 84 pixels when separate and 101 when merged! You get the idea.

Finally in the spirit of full collaboration I’m making the source code available — I’m not opening up the interface (which contains secret information that allows me to generate and keep track of tokens and make sure people don’t cheat) but most of the implementation is in the helper file below.

Source:
crowdsource-helper.rb

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 04:06 and is filed under art, code, paramathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.