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| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)
enqk wrote 6 hours 59 min ago:
Japanese family crests (Mon: ç´) are almost entirely made of circles
(and lines, but that's rarer)
Often depicting slices of vegetables, animals..
From few circles to hundreds
kleiba wrote 10 hours 25 min ago:
Not circles, but arcs.
hmwhy wrote 10 hours 7 min ago:
If you pay closer attention, you can see that some of the designs
rely on very deliberate placements of circles; for example, eyes of
the monkey and owl, and the nose of the whale.
Those are just the obvious ones that I can immediately spot â there
was probably a lot of careful consideration into the placement of
circles in order to facilitate good looking arcs and circles that
bring the animals to "life".
kleiba wrote 8 hours 49 min ago:
Sure, you're not wrong. But a circle is just an arc of length 2pi *
radius.
I_Nidhi wrote 10 hours 28 min ago:
Reminds me of the time we made geometric art using a compass.
URI [1]: https://homeschoolmath.blogspot.com/2013/02/geometric-art-proj...
noduerme wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
This page feels like an AI traveled back in time and (faked) the date.
[edit] Nevermind. I'm being too harsh. The creator was obviously having
fun and being creative. That's cool. I think if nothing else this just
proves how jaded and skeptical about clever artwork I've become in the
past few years.
rob74 wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
> Inspired by the Twitter logo, which is made from 13 perfect circles
Compared to that, the new logo doesn't have a circle (segment) anywhere
to be seen (unless you consider straight lines as circle segments with
the center located at infinity of course), and is simply the
"mathematical double-struck capital X" from an unknown but probably
pre-existing font (apparently Monotype's "Special Alphabets 4" comes
close, but isn't identical, according to [1] ).
URI [1]: https://tweethunter.io/blog/how-to-write-twitter-x-iphone-mac-...
vismit2000 wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
Reminds of 'Drawing with circles' in 3b1b classic on Fourier series:
[1] So if we remove the condition of 13, everything is in fact made of
circles only!
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k
thesz wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
Because circles there also need operations over them (union,
intersection or subtraction), it is a good example of low complexity
art [1]
My son is a big fan of bytebeat [2], which is also a low complexity
art, but music.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-complexity_art
URI [2]: https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/#4AAAA+kUryC/X0CixswNhQyM1Q01NNT...
saunved_42 wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
I really love the way these look. I'm imagining a short film with these
characters, and it'd be a nice experiment to see how it turns out.
KolibriFly wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
Reminds me of how some of the best ideas come out of working within
restrictions, not in spite of them
gcanyon wrote 17 hours 8 min ago:
It bugs me than e.g. the owl's ears benefit from a dramatic change in
color that isn't related to anything outlined by the circles.
fracus wrote 23 hours 53 min ago:
Art with restrictions can be more interesting than without.
yesthisiswes wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
This is so true. I took a figure drawing class in college and we were
instructed to draw with a cloth and charcoal dust. Easily some of the
best work I made came out of that restriction.
PlunderBunny wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
Architecture too. The worst building come from architects given a
blank page to start with. Constraints, and sympathy for the
surrounding built environment produce great work.
ezekg wrote 1 day ago:
It's really satisfying to create logomarks solely out of circles, idk
why. A challenge, I guess.
I did a few back in my day as a designer:
1. [1] 2. [2] That first one is some of my best work.
URI [1]: https://dribbble.com/shots/1909369-Liberty-Eagle-Arms
URI [2]: https://dribbble.com/shots/1553151-Flint-mark-icons
tuyiown wrote 13 hours 21 min ago:
Constraints forces creativity. Some well chosen constraints are
aesthetics rules that helps you land pleasing results. Poetry has a
long history on that matter.
Another example of constrained creativity is early to mid nineties
electronic music.
KolibriFly wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
There's something oddly meditative about designing within strict
constraints like circles
jaredhallen wrote 20 hours 46 min ago:
Yeah, those are all really nice. Good work.
ge96 wrote 1 day ago:
I miss being creative, before I knew how to make front end UIs I had
crazy ideas but then became grounded. This one isn't super crazy but I
like those vertical buildings.
Tangent, with a dark/colorful theme in an editor the minimap looks like
a city scape
sverhagen wrote 1 day ago:
It feels like I'm looking at the next so many Ubuntu backgrounds!
agys wrote 1 day ago:
My aunt grifted me âAnimali Compassatiâ when I was a kid⦠A small
book with instructions for animals that you could draw with a compass.
The site is unclear somehow⦠but the instructions were pretty great
in the book. [1]
URI [1]: https://www.danielenannini.it/en/portfolio/animali-compassati/
URI [2]: https://www.compasses-zoo.net/compasses-zoo/index.php
__s wrote 1 day ago:
Curious how well transforms on circles could be composed to animate
these animals
apankrat wrote 1 day ago:
I did something similar 15+ years ago to use as an avatar in forums,
twitters and some such -
URI [1]: https://swapped.ch/#!/personal-mark
barbazoo wrote 1 day ago:
Could this be the next captcha challenge? "Draw an animal out of 13
circles to prove you are human".
CamperBob2 wrote 1 day ago:
I was thinking that this would be low-hanging fruit for a model. The
parameter space is so tiny compared to what a diffusion model already
has to deal with...
ksajh wrote 1 day ago:
class Animal
{
Circle circles_[13];
}
mondobe wrote 1 day ago:
interface Animal {
Circle[13] circles();
// Leftover from Intro to CS, remember to remove
void make_sound();
}
gnramires wrote 1 day ago:
You also need to encode the painted areas somehow. They are not only
intersections on K shapes, but sometimes exclusions as well (like
(A^B)/C). Two ways come to mind:
(1) Listing closed curves by vertices. Each vertex of a painted area
is an intersection of two or more circles, and delimits a section of
a circle. So the section of circles that enclose a circle can be
encoded each by the union of:
(1.1) A circle (index);
(1.2) A 2nd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a first point;
(1.3) A bit identifying the (first) intersection (because there may
be 2 possible);
(1.4) A 3rd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a second point;
(1.5) A bit identifying the (second) intersection.
Note the base circle would be the first intersection of a subsequent
section of this closed curve, and the 3rd circle would be the
subsequent base circle. So 1/2/3 won't be necessary for subsequent
curves. So only (K+2) indices + (K+1) bits are necessary for this
encoding.
Total ~K log2(K)+K bits. I hypothesize (left to the reader :)) a
closed curve should contain at most 2x13 points. There can be at most
2^13 distinct regions however, so each figure (Animal) can be encoded
with less than that many curves per figure. So each figure (Animal)
can be encoded with less than 2^13 x 26x(5+1) bits =~ 1.3Mbit.
But that's mostly pathological cases, if each Animal must be a fully
connected area, then that might reduce (hypothesis above) to at most
only
26x(5+1) bits = 156 bits, or 20 bytes!
I left out a problem which area shapes encoded within each other
(like eyes). In that case you need at most another 156 bits per inner
cutout shape.
(2) Alternatively, you could use boolean operations to encode each
shape. Also left as a fun problem :)
glxxyz wrote 1 day ago:
I never really liked Twitter but I feel oddly nostalgic for the logo
now.
dukeofdoom wrote 1 day ago:
This guy is doing something similar for his game:
The Procedural Animation [1] Gibbon: Beyond the Trees - Wolfire Games
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlfh_rv6khY
URI [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCKdGlpsdlo
deadbabe wrote 1 day ago:
Could an AI generate art like this and actually utilize perfect
circles, to create whatever you ask?
DrNosferatu wrote 1 day ago:
Not exactly circles, but famously:
With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make
him wiggle his trunk.
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%27s_elephant
rob74 wrote 12 hours 26 min ago:
Looks more like an amoeba to me...
KolibriFly wrote 15 hours 33 min ago:
Feels like the mathematical version of "just because you can doesn't
mean you should."
kbelder wrote 23 hours 26 min ago:
"and with 20 billion I can make it hold a conversation."
NitpickLawyer wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
To paraphrase that quote about hydrogen: Give gradient descent a
few billion parameters, and it starts wondering where it came from
and what does it all mean.
kazinator wrote 19 hours 41 min ago:
Bravo! HN Gold.
WorkerBee28474 wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
Related: 'A meeting with Enrico Fermi'
URI [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/427297a
nonethewiser wrote 1 day ago:
Im curious what the process looks like to implement this. It seems like
it would be easiest to start with the animal using only perfectly(?)
curved lines and then complete them into circles after the fact.
Although that seems kind of pointless and I imagine they start with
circles. And I guess it would hard to have a curve from a perfect
circle without the circle?
I just have a hard time imagining you start with circles, lay them down
(resize as needed) and continue. I mean I guess that doesnt sound so
crazy after I say it... it just seems like it would add a lot of extra
noise to the image that would make it much harder to draw.
KolibriFly wrote 14 hours 45 min ago:
What's wild is how much clarity and personality you can get from that
process. Instead of adding noise, it forces simplification, which
actually helps with visual clarity
laurentlb wrote 1 day ago:
There's some information on: [1] "While sketching, I kept track of
the number of circles I was using, counting one for every curve."
After sketching an animal, it should be easier to adjust the image by
inserting/removing/moving circles.
URI [1]: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/01/illustrating-animal...
nonethewiser wrote 1 day ago:
Awesome, thank you!
adamanonymous wrote 1 day ago:
There are some photos of sketches at the bottom of the page. Looks
like they started with curves and turned them into circles later
nonethewiser wrote 1 day ago:
I suppose the thing the circle is really informing is the
"perfectness" of the curve. You cant just draw in curves and extend
it to a circle (wont be perfect). I guess Im not sure how you get
"perfect" curves.
I suspect its a stencil or something. So in some sense the circle
does exist first, even if they only draw the curve from it
initially (before marking it up with the full circle after the
fact).
PebblesRox wrote 1 day ago:
If I were trying to do something like this I would sketch it out
first with imperfect curves and then worry about making it
perfect once I was at the computer. It would look slightly
different but I donât think it would make that much of an
impact in the initial design process.
tarentel wrote 1 day ago:
I can't speak to this but I took a drawing class a long time ago. I'm
not very good but it was a lot of drawing circles. When you see
people freehand stuff it's kind of wild but that's not how people
learn how to draw they're just very good at it from practice. Most of
learning is drawing very basic shapes, usually circles, and erasing
parts that don't make sense and continuing.
barrenko wrote 14 hours 45 min ago:
True, I did some amateur vector art (in Illustrator) and you
basically have to compose objects out of basic shapes. It is truly
highly meditative.
jihadjihad wrote 1 day ago:
> drawing very basic shapes, usually circles, and erasing parts
that don't make sense
There's a hilarious Spongebob bit [0] where Squidward is teaching
an art class, and he starts off in that exact manner of trying to
draw a perfect circle, only to have Spongebob subvert the entire
idea. The whole episode is artistic gold IMO.
0:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTlpFEvmxdM
tarentel wrote 1 day ago:
I do remember that. Sorry I can't find a better website but this
is a similar joke.
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/restofthefuckingowl/comments/6f...
pimlottc wrote 18 hours 46 min ago:
The origin of this is the âhow to draw an owlâ pic
URI [1]: https://imgur.com/how-i-feel-when-somebody-gives-me-ad...
lll-o-lll wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
Except The Tick was drawn in 1988, so has somewhat a prior
art claim here.
tmountain wrote 1 day ago:
I have been practicing art a lot lately. You can draw just about
anything using spheres, cubes, cylinders, and cones. You start off
with the 2d versions.
tarentel wrote 1 day ago:
I stopped after a few classes but I was amazed at how good I got
in a short amount of time after learning how to break stuff down
which isn't something I really thought about before. By all
metrics I'm still a pretty terrible drawer but prior to that
stick figures would have been challenging.
floxy wrote 1 day ago:
Another good resource for learning how to draw realistically is
the book: "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". The
premise is that your brain wants to take shortcuts and
group/chunk things together on what they should look like,
instead of what things actually look like. But even a
rectangle in real life has non-right-angles because of
perspective, etc.. And if you draw what you actually see, then
the drawings come out correct. Some of the exercises are
copying other drawings placed upside-down, so that you brain
doesn't try to over-interpret things. I can't recommend this
enough if you want to go from a beginner to something
respectable in drawing abilities. [1]
URI [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Defini...
URI [2]: https://kk.org/cooltools/drawing-on-the-right-side-of-...
tmountain wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
I read the book and loved it (about 15 years ago). Thereâs
no royal road to becoming an artist but lots of joy along the
way. Whatever the path, enjoy it!
kunzhi wrote 1 day ago:
Drawing from circles, squares, triangles, etc. in art is called
"construction" and is definitely a foundational technique. It
really is amazing how much easier drawing becomes once it's
understood (and practiced).
paulirish wrote 1 day ago:
Vaguely related and also fun: [1] (2011)
URI [1]: https://www.koalastothemax.com/
tzury wrote 1 day ago:
2016â¦
This type of content is becoming rarer on the internet nowadays.
KiranRao0 wrote 1 day ago:
I donât think less of this type of content exists. Its just harder
to find when inundated with all other slop on the internet.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
Just doing a Google search for "animals made from circles", you get
the usual header full of "Images" and "Videos" crap, then in the
actual results links, you have the usual Pinterest linkslop,
Facebook linkslop, Reddit linkslop, a bunch of articles written by
the designer (now we're getting somewhere). OP's link is finally on
page 4 of the search results.
dwringer wrote 1 day ago:
For me, searching "animals made from circles", your comment put
this HN thread as the #1 result while the #2 result was a
syndicated article about the linked post. When I get more
specific and search "animals drawn only from circles" it turns up
the linked post as the first result. But my results may be more
specific partly because I don't use ad blockers.
netghost wrote 1 day ago:
Or we just don't look past twitter and such.
curiousObject wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting.
What animals cannot be accurately depicted with 13 circles?
Y_Y wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Corals?
bsza wrote 1 day ago:
You can depict any animal swallowed by a pufferfish with 1 circle.
jessekv wrote 1 day ago:
What is essential is invisible to the eye.
mixedbit wrote 1 day ago:
centipede
globnomulous wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
I was going to suggest "octopus" but your answer is better.
curiousObject wrote 1 day ago:
I think so. With 13 circles, I canât figure out how you could
represent more than 26 legs (and other features would be lost).
InitialLastName wrote 1 day ago:
You can use perspective tricks to only show half the legs
A mature house centipede has 15 pairs of legs. You can probably
get the point across with a portion of that, and use two parts of
a circle for 2 legs.
trieloff wrote 1 day ago:
Pelican on a bicycle
addaon wrote 1 day ago:
More generally, any animal that cannot be drawn in 12 circles
cannot be drawn in 13 circles when riding a bicycle. By recursion,
no animal can be drawn when riding a stack of seven bicycles.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
An owl?
ccozan wrote 1 day ago:
Could be this [1] But not that artsy as the OG.
URI [1]: https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/67ed7147fc708191be5b81ed...
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
It was much less of an actual example as it was a reference to
the draw the rest of the owl meme
nonethewiser wrote 1 day ago:
minecraft sheep
iamwil wrote 1 day ago:
I remember some post that I can find now, that demonstrated the twitter
bird logo is also made from circles. All I can find is this reddit post
now.
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/txdimd/the...
KolibriFly wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
Not sure how precise it really is, but it looks convincing enough to
feel intentional
tylershuster wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://designshack.net/articles/graphics/twitters-new-logo-...
wwarren wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs mentioned in the article under the images as the inspiration
for this work
neallindsay wrote 1 day ago:
That was referenced in the post as the impetus for making these.
Unfortunately it just links to a Google search.
abeppu wrote 1 day ago:
See also work from Schmidhuber in the mid/late 1990s
URI [1]: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoart/node12.html
srean wrote 1 day ago:
He was done a great deal of injustice when he was passed over for the
Turing award that was given to Hinton, Bengio, LeCun.
Then there is this from his blog --
Dec 2024: Sadly, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 for Hopfield &
Hinton is a Nobel Prize for plagiarism. They republished
methodologies developed in Ukraine and Japan by Ivakhnenko and Amari
in the 1960s & 1970s, as well as other techniques, without citing the
original papers. Even in later surveys, they didn't credit the
original inventors (thus turning what may have been unintentional
plagiarism into a deliberate form). None of the important algorithms
for modern Artificial Intelligence were created by Hopfield & Hinton.
Details in the recent technical report, with lots of references,
links, and facts.
URI [1]: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/physics-nobel-2024-plagiari...
moralestapia wrote 1 day ago:
Agree.
Also, AlphaFold is great but hardly an innovation. David Baker
deserved it 100%.
ehaveman wrote 1 day ago:
wow, that's beautiful - the whole site [1] is an amazing rabbit hole
im gonna lose myself in.
URI [1]: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/
Etheryte wrote 1 day ago:
The red button is an absolute delight, be sure not to press it.
moconnor wrote 1 day ago:
I thought this was a joke, but he actually did do this first.
Impressive!
seanhunter wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure whether or not he did this first, but it's very
similar to an extremely impressive, but old and well-known
illustration of the power of Fourier analysis in which you
construct a "Fourier epicycle" (think: machine made of circular
gears of different ratios) that can sketch any image. 3blue1brown
has a great video on Fourier Epicycles but you can also get the
idea here
URI [1]: https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/171755/how...
floxy wrote 1 day ago:
Also of potential interest is Kempe's Universailty Theroem which
states you can draw any (polynomial) shape with a set of
mechanical linkages. Like one that will sign your name. [1]
URI [1]: https://academic.oup.com/plms/article/s1-7/1/213/1570315...
URI [2]: http://www.koutschan.de/data/link/
dekhn wrote 1 day ago:
damn, I got nerdsniped again
iamwil wrote 1 day ago:
Or check out drawing Homer Simpson with the same technique
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw
ajross wrote 1 day ago:
I tend to wonder if stuff like this is an informative boundary on AI
capabilities. I mean, you can't ask a LLM today to do that (AFAICT).
"Here's a simply-specified but extremely broad search space, solve this
problem in it" isn't something that fits the model. But it's a
relatively common (if not "easy") task human beings like to show off.
What needs to change to enable this kind of exploration?
iamwil wrote 1 day ago:
I was thinking it could, actually, given a feedback loop. The tool
use would a json that takes 13 circles, each with x, y position,
radius, and whether it's filled in or empty, and output an image. It
could look at the image and iterate.
abeppu wrote 1 day ago:
Actually, the (in)famous "sparks of general intelligence paper" about
GPT-4 included tasks such as "Draw a unicorn in TikZ" which really is
not that far off from this task. There were also examples for drawing
cars/trucks/cats etc with SVG.
But I do think that evolutionary algorithms or MCMC variants could do
a better job of this, especially if paired with an auxiliary model
for scoring their intermediate results.
gwern wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, this has been done in many forms with other algorithms. You
score each generation with a model like CLIP, for example, and then
you can evolve 'Mona Lisa made of triangles', say. A constraint
like 'exactly 13 circles' will work fine. (And you might experiment
with loosening it, like generating a lot of candidates with 5-30
circles each, as a 'library' or 'seeds', before shrinking them all
towards 13, to see if you get novel animal designs which are find
to find if you simply start the obvious way with 13 circles
initialized to random points & sizes.)
JohnKemeny wrote 1 day ago:
Is it impossible, in this day and age, to enjoy a post without
thinking about LLMs? It's like an obsession.
ajross wrote 1 day ago:
Well, sort of? I mean, I've seen plenty of clever art in my life.
I'm still figuring out AI. I posted that in the hope that someone
in the community here would show up with something insightful to
say.
elpocko wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, it is impossible. People will think about things they find
interesting regardless of your (dis-)approval. Who are you even
calling "obsessive?" The collective of people who dare to mention
algorithms you don't like? I mean, what the fuck?
albedoa wrote 1 day ago:
Calm down dude, for fuck's sake. Read yourself back.
y1n0 wrote 1 day ago:
It should be obvious that this is entirely up to the reader. Take
some responsibility for your own happiness. Nobody else is
responsible for your enjoyment of anything.
generationP wrote 1 day ago:
Nope, but this post is such a neat illustration of the richness of
"life" that fits into 39 real parameters (each circle can be
coordinatized as 3 real numbers: one for its radius and two for its
center) that my first thought on seeing it was also "no surprise
then that a matrix with a million entries can talk like an erudite
person".
jstanley wrote 1 day ago:
And all of those are simply translation and scaling of 36
parameters with an implicit unit circle at the origin.
Then if you want to factor out rotations, drop another parameter
and say the 1st explicit circle lies on the x axis.
floxy wrote 1 day ago:
Wouldn't you also need a two parameters for the arc starting
position and stopping position for each circle, and then a few
more to identify the areas that need to be filled, along with the
color?
laurentlb wrote 1 day ago:
Once you've drawn the circles, I think you just need to specify
which regions are filled.
Arcs are just intersection of circles, so they are implicit, as
far as I can tell.
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