Iconizer: Make data |
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It is said that there is no point in setting off next year in a spaceship bound for a distant star. This is because a spacecraft built this year would, in a few years time, be obsolete. It would be overtaken by a craft built five years later with improved technology that enabled it to travel faster.
So it is with computers. Not only does the hardware improve but so does the software. Iconizer produces images around a thousand times faster than was the case when Symmetry In Chaos was first published in 1992. Even so, to produce symmetric icons at ever higher resolutions, at full colour depth, sucks away the processing power of modern computers. There are also issues with how many decimal places are used in the iterative calculation. Early weather forecasters famously got different predictions for the next day's weather on two different computers. It turned out that one rounded off the sixteenth decimal place, the other always threw it away. Eventually, how that sixteenth decimal place was processed completely altered the predicted path of the weather. Such computational problems are the hallmark of chaos.
Of course, with weather forecasting, it's no good taking two days to predict the next day's weather. On the other hand, Iconizer can be given time. With time, Iconizer can produce the raw data that would be a first step towards producing higher quality images than those produced by Iconizer itself. Another computer program, not yet written, could then take this data and colour it in interesting ways - this is of particular interest to me, as a digital artist. Iconizer can also be given to more than one computer, each writing the Make data file for a different image. Such a task can usefully be given to an older machine that would otherwise be scrapped.
Running Make data is not for the faint hearted; it ties down a computer for days at a time. If your computer is ten times faster than mine, (unlikely!) it'll still take days to iterate 128 billion times. With iteration, technology meets its match. In timing tests on an Iyonix in February 2010, Iconiser was measured generating data at around 56 thousand iterations a second whith rotational symmetry of order four requested. The optimised Make data routine trumped the 52 thousand iterations a second achieved when trying to colourize the image at the same time. There is no program yet written (February 2010) that can process the resulting output, although Iconizer lets you look at it.
Iconizer's strength is in making it easy to find new and interesting images with existing technology. Make data is an acknowledgement that neither it nor any other program can yet colour the resulting images in a truly artistic way. In fact, the 1992 book Symmetry In Chaos set a standard that has yet to be significantly improved upon. If it helps the future come sooner, I can convert or supply Make data files in various file formats, such as PNG or GIF, to anyone interested in writing an artists' computer program to colourize them. Each pixel, which counts the number of times it is hit, can take any value between 0 and 4294967295. i.e. 32 bit colour depth. There are 2304000 pixels (1920 by 1200) in an HD image. Make data currently uses nine significant figures in calculations. This has thus far proved adequate, but may become an issue.
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