Tiny Art in Less Than 280 Characters (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Tiny Art in Less Than 280 Characters (2017)

fronkonstin.com

122 pointselsherbini31 comments

If you like this, you'll like https://www.dwitter.net

Yes! I've seen dwitter too! Some of the things made there are simply amazing. Of those being the conway's game of life simulations!

Reminds me of the SuperCollider audio "album" of tracks encoded under the old 140 character limit. I still often use this for coding background music.

https://supercollider.github.io/community/sc140

These are amazing.

Very cool

I have just noticed that at archive.org the track names are in fact the entire source definition of the track. Ha!

If you like this type of music, you should check out the (horribly-named) genre IDM for some slightly longer tracks - some standouts are Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Venetian Snares

:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8

I am a huge fan of Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics and Hadley's implementation of them in ggplot2. Thanks for sharing this; it helps demo the power of the grammar. Since learning GG it has made me think of plotting in an additive fashion instead of before when Excel would do most of it for me and I would often be forced to remove layers I didn't need.

If 280 characters is way too bloated (and you love reverse polish notation (and who doesn't)) you can try stackie

https://github.com/Lerc/stackie

image viewer http://fingswotidun.com/stackie/?code=yx%2F1%3Cx!-~&palette=...

or images directly served from url code http://stackie.fingswotidun.com/yx%2F1%3Cx!-~xy8wxy99*w+9/+&...

New category for IOCCC: 'Tweetable'?

In the same general spirit, check bytebeats!

http://countercomplex.blogspot.fi/2011/10/algorithmic-sympho... http://canonical.org/%7Ekragen/bytebeat/

That's a great site, thanks. It's not common finding such artistic taste, programming/mathematical skill, and capacity to explain well, in the same person.

I love this!

Do you think it's worth learning just to make art? If so, where do I start?

They are using external libraries... I can't tell if it's a joke but if it's not then no, you didn't do it in less than 280 characters. Otherwise I can generate the mona lisa with 3 characters: m()

3 characters is still less than 280, right? It doesn't look like you're contradicting their claim in any way.

Could you elaborate a little bit more. I'm not sure I understand your point.

I think they mean that libraries like 'ggplot2' and 'dplyr' and 'TurtleGraphics' use a LOT more than 280 lines of code.

When people see 'small code generates pretty graphics', they usually don't equate that to, 'a library was used as intended.'

They think of projects that use math in interesting ways to wring unexpected results out of very limited conditions. Stuff like this: http://www.ozone3d.net/tutorials/intro_demoscene.php

It's cool and fun to graph mathematical patterns, but it does seem a little disingenuous to call it "Tiny Art".

it's tiny because it can be expressed in a tiny respresentation

Ive just come up with a symbol that represents the entire collection of the Louvre.

That is a symbol with 0 re-use and therefore 0 abstraction. That is much less interesting than a represtentation that can generalize across a wide range of uses

No no, it is actually extremely flexible and reusable:

draw("louvre")

It has support for lots of collections.

It's silly to brag about your minimal code if you use external libraries that contain millions of characters.

But I don't think that was the point of that article. It says:

>> Now that Twitter allows 280 characters, the code of some drawings I have made can fit in a tweet. In this post I have compiled a few of them.

It's about a list of code snippets that you can send around on Twitter, that can generate interesting "art". It doesn't claim to be the shortest code that can be used to generate art. It just says it can fit inside a tweet.

This kind of thing always needs some arbitrary line drawing.

Even if there no external libraries and only pure machine code, that machine code still runs in an environment defined by hardware components, and those hardware components have a lot of thought and effort behind them.

At what level is it no longer cheating?

> At what level is it no longer cheating?

If specialized audio/video processing hardware is allowed then here: https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/

Or, if that's also cheating, then here: https://linusakesson.net/scene/bitbanger/

Do your programs also include the instructions for mining metals and manufacturing CPUs?

Ehh...that's a stretch.

Typically, 'scene' demos like this intended to be very few lines of code run in assembly without the use of libraries, something that speaks directly to the metal, certainly usually not a higher-level language...but I've never heard of building hardware itself as being part of a 'demo' like this.

I get that you're exaggerating, but I do agree with people's sentiment that if it's using a library to handle the drawing, it's also a stretch to call it 280 characters.

I think the key for 'scene' type demos is more that the code is run in some particular environment, and the impressive part is how far the demo stretches the capabilities of the environment, and how creatively it presses against the constraints.

280 characters of R+ggplot generating art is at least cute. It's a powerful environment, but constrained input data.

I mean, no one's going to say that a demo like kkrieger isn't impressive (the famed "96KB FPS") despite using 3D rendering APIs and such, right?

I’m not saying it’s not impressive. I’m just saying I actually kind of agree with the poster who stated it’s kinda using a library as expected

Each example contains the equation/algorithm used to create the image. Yours does not.

The (2017) tag adds very little to the title...

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