The Art of Code
Thoughts and highlights about a thought-provoking video
I enjoyed this video on YouTube:
The speaker asks - is coding art, science, or is it engineering? Or all of them?
He covers Conway’s Game of Life - an algorithm transferred from paper to screen which makes intriguing patterns. There’s a part of the video the speaker shows how you can use the Game of Life to build up predictable patterns, boolean logic, a circuit, computer, a program and then write the Game of Life in the Game of Life. When he zooms out it feels like looking at the Matrix.
He talks about the Mandelbrot Set - an area of math dealing with an infinitely repeating pattern which as you zoom it looks similar to itself but never repeats.
He speaks about Google’s Deep Dreams experiment in machine learning. For example, the algorithm used to recognize dogs in a picture is inverted so that it amplifies dogs in a picture which has no dogs. You can do the same without any coding by uploading and image on Deep Dream Generator and choosing the dream dream option and some parameters. It’s a social media platform similar to Instagram.