Making a Fortune Telling Machine (2016)

This was absolutely marvelous! Apart from it being the best wedding present ever, the write up is superb: generally with build projects the focus is on HW, however, the most intriguing aspect of this one was the design of the cards and fortune generation. The fact that people could affect the fortune being generated by manipulating cards was an ingenious touch. When people have an input in the generation they’ll be more apt to believe in the generated fortune.

The references to folktales and automatic plot generation are great. Something like Llull’s Ars Magna wheels could also have been used for random, rather than deterministic generation perhaps.

I looked at other projects done by the author, they are fascinating. You can read a good interview with her here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160507041048/https://femhype.c...

Amazing execution! I love fortunes and the tarot data set linked looks amazing.