William J. Mitchell: "Imagine the Algorithm"

ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Design & Computation Gallery

Los Angeles, California

Introduction, Pages 8-9.

Year of Publication: 2008. ISBN:978-1-60558-344-0

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(...) "How do designers create elegantly economical input sequences? By exploiting principles of order. A repetitive design, for example, can be specified very economically by first describing the repeating element, and then giving a “repeat” command with appropriate parameters. This does not take much work on the designer’s part, but it creates a lot of commands for the fabrication device to execute. However, if a design is composed of arbitrarily located random shapes – with no evident order – then the designer’s only option is to specify each shape and location explicitly. This may not result in any more instructions for the fabrication device to execute, but it requires a lot more input from the designer."

(...) "In general though, there is no recipe for creating elegantly simple input to generate extensive and varied fabricated forms, just as there is no recipe for deriving elegantly simple scientific laws that describe widely varied phenomena. In both cases, it takes creative insight into underlying structure."

(...) "Here, then, is a way of critically examining and understanding the artifacts on display in this show. For each one, try to imagine the shortest algorithm that would generate it. Then generalize, and imagine an algorithm that would produce variations on the theme. If you can come up with something clever and cogent, you have achieved a deep understanding of the piece."