TLDR: I tried to automate the formation of ligatures in style of Slavic calligraphy, called a monospaced Vyaz. A gallery with examples of results can be found here. Details are below.
Intro
There is an old Slavic calligraphy tradition, called ‘Russian monospaced Vyaz’ or just ‘Vyaz’. It’s unique in terms of special forms and rules of ligature generation. For example, take a look at works of a contemporary artist Viktor Pushkarev.
Once, a colleague of mine, Anna Shishlyakova drew a nice piece of Vyaz and since then I kept thinking if one can automatically generate such ligatures. Several years have passed and I finally found a weekend to make something like this:
General description
The current implementation consists of several components:
- a configuration file that determines the size of symbols, kerning and ligature assembly parameters (as an example, I give a pack of several different configuration files with crafted…
Averaged faces from classical paintings
TLDR: I took a subset of 18.5K portraits from a dataset of the Kaggle competition, Painter by Numbers, and arranged them by style and gender. Then I used the Facer library from John W. Miller to build average faces based on these portrait groups, as well as a time-lapse of average faces from the portraits dating from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Check out my society6 page for prints of these portraits.
Details
I used metadata from the Painter by Numbers dataset, where the subset of portraits was less than 20%. The metadata is quite detailed and convenient, including authors, styles, titles, and years of creation. After filtering, I had about 18.5K paintings declared as portraits. …
TLDR: As a part of a funny online competition called Nano-NaNoGenMo we managed to craft the 123 bytes Perl script for a Markov Chain text generation; 139 bytes in total with a shell command (and even shorter if we allow some input file tweaking, see the remark at the very bottom of the post).
The rest of the post gives some clues on the process of optimization — from a clean and shiny 752-bytes rosetta-code implemetation to the end and beyond.
COMPETITION AND RULES
I already wrote something about the annual competition for automatic novel text generation, National Novel Generation Month (also known as NaNoGenMo). During November, participants have to write some computer program which generates a text with at least 50000 words and publish the source code. No other rules apply.
But this year it had a twist — the narratology enthusiast from MIT, Nick Montfort, decided to run a spin-off competition, Nano-NaNoGenMo (aka NNNGM), with only one additional rule — the program should have 256 bytes at most (with the possibility of using any of Project Gutenberg files as input). …
