sublimeloge

On the computer graphics side of things, there's a 2006 paper based on essentially the same underlying idea:

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGOvYyJ6r1c

paper: https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-flows/

Ahh, neat! That sounds like it results in some nice patterns. In that case, this paper might be more relevant http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/pad/pad.html. Its related work section should also have some good references to other things like this. For the most part they'll likely be too complex to make them worth implementing, but it might still be interesting or give you some inspiration for new ideas.

This doesn't quite answer the question that you're asking, but there's a semi-old research paper that seems related to what you want: http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/csk/projects/escherization/ No readily-usable scripts that I'm aware of unfortunately.

A bit of context: Marjorie Rice achieved minor fame for discovering a number of new ways that (irregular) pentagons can tile the plane -- a surprising feat for an amateur mathematician. You can read more about her on here https://www.quantamagazine.org/marjorie-rices-secret-pentago... and more about pentagonal tessellations here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagonal_tiling, along with a history for when the different tessellations were discovered over the past century or so.

Personally, I love this webpage partially because it's just so different than what I'm used to for the pages of mathematicians. It really comes across as made by someone who was extremely talented at math but who only saw it only as a pastime and never bothered to integrate into the mathematical community.

For those who haven't seen the language before, I think it's also useful to know what expression evaluation in Icon works using a recursive backtracking algorithm. This means that the most natural way of writing a string scanning parser (like the one above) more or less automatically gives you a recursive backtracking parser. Like ebiester, I too have found it to be a nice way to do certain kinds of simple string parsing.

I expect the article doesn't mention them because it views them as a means to an end. Since the article is about high-level philosophical concerns and not the nuts and bolts of how the music is created, talking about compositional/performance tools such as computers and synthesizers would be out of place -- the article is more concerned with the aesthetic goals which these or other tools would be used toward rather than the tools themselves.

Anyway the article does actually mention electronics at least twice, althouh both times mostly in passing:

"I draw your attention to the example we heard yesterday, when Nathan Davies used live filtering to give the effect of resonators, extracting tones from white noise, and turning those tones towards music."

"Joanna Bailie, to take just one example, has used the recorded and digitally processed sounds ..."

I expect that this article's title will give some Hacker News readers an incorrect impression of what it's about.

As the article mentions, this talk was given at the Donaueschingen Festival, so the audience almost certainly consisted mostly of fans of avant-garde contemporary classical music. If the author only mentions jazz or rock, or electronics only in passing, it's because he's primarily talking about the future of contemporary classical music, and in particular the future of the sort of highly-experimental classical music played at the Donaueschingen Festival, and probably not the future of music at large.

In this context, I think his question is a reasonable one. What will/should innovative classical music look like in the future? The article's suggestion seems to be that it should focus less on being radically experimental, and more on innovating in a way which is more deeply rooted in traditional techniques and more easily comprehensible to the listener. I suppose the question is, in light of what is now a long history of extreme musical experimentation, what does innovation look like in this more traditional context? I obviously don't have any answers, but I agree with the author that it would be nice to see more focus in this in the experimental classical music culture.

As an aside, this article has a lot of references to composers and pieces which will make it tough reading for someone not already familiar with avant-garde classical. That said, it does give a nice whirlwind overview of a lot of historical trends in this space, so if you're unfamiliar, but still sufficiently interested, you might use it as a quick reference for areas to listen to. Alex Ross' book "The Rest is Noise" is a good resource for a deeper look at the area.

I don't know of any science in this area yet, because everything I'm aware of is far too speculative to be called "science". That said there is some science-aware philosophy in this area, more notably "The Emperor's New Mind" and "Shadows of the Mind" by Roger Penrose (also mentioned by lkozma below).

Scott Aaronson also published a essay in this area recently which tackles the issue of relationships free will and quantum physics from a pretty neat angle. It's the first attempt I've seen in this area that I sort of like (not to say I agree or disagree with it, I just like it). It's available for free online: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/giqtm3.pdf

I've always noted it as Sigma_loop, since it's basically the busy-beaver function for a programming language with no recursion and in which the bounds of every loop must stay fixed throughout the loop.

Hey all, puzzle poser from the Povray thread here. If you want a somewhat trickier version, try giving the last five digits of the case where you have 100 nested loops (instead of just four). It requires a very different, but oddly satisfying approach.