Ghost Diagrams (tile pattern generator in Javascript/SVG)
logarithmic.net
logarithmic.net
* You enter a list of "tiles" in the box, on either a square grid (four characters per tile) or hex grid (six characters).
* Upper case letters (like "A") represent pointy sides, and lowercase letters (like "a") are convex sides. You can use A through D.
* Numbers 1-4 are "flat" sides, which makes sense as they have no case.
* A hyphen seems to be a second kind of whitespace that has to match itself, unless it has some other special meaning.
* The program, while running, searches for a way to fill the entire view area with a consistent pattern, though not necessarily filling every grid cell with a tile. Sometimes it finds one quickly, and sometimes it struggles for a while.
The shapes of the "pieces" are strange-looking enough that I didn't realize at first they are simply a function of the input.
Very cool!
You made me look 'aleatoric' up just now ("a process is said to be aleatoric ... if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail" per Wikipedia), but all I found was stuff I had heard of a long time ago, in that you can generate various types of music randomly and a reference to a very old dice game attributed to Mozart.
So I'm left wondering how this generator would be more useful for generating random music than ordinary dice or a RNG?
That's one way to implement it. All of the generative music algorithms I've seen have been very limited, and have produced one specific flavor of music. Seeing all these amazing patterns in the ghost diagrams, I wonder if there's a clue to generating more diverse/expressive music lurking within this system. (Emergent behavior?)