91.548 Meeting 8

1. project writeups. Great job people. Everybody did substantial work in readying their projects for Botfest. Now I need them to be documented.

   This time, I'd like things to be prepared in paper format. The paper should have the following sections:

   • Abstract. This is a short, 1- or 2-paragraph description of the project goals, what was accomplished, what key lessons were learned, and what might be next for the work.

   • Introduction. This is a larger discussion that orients the reader to your work. This should include references to related work and a discussion of your goals in setting out to do the work.

   • Main narrative. This is the heart of the paper. It describes what you actually built. Sufficient technical detail should be included so that the reader could in theory reproduce your project and have the hard part already done for them.

     Every paper should have at least one diagram, but probably more than one, as part of the main presentation. There must be a block diagram that shows the key features of your project. Most projects will require other diagrams to fill out the discussion.

   • Conclusion and future directions. This section summarizes the key lessons learned from the work. In a research paper, this would be new and original contributions to knowledge. For the purposes of this paper, it is fine if the conclusions include what you learned from the project. It's also good if the conclusions involve external phenomena and things outside your own learning.

     This section also should include directions for future work (even if you don't expect to carry out the work yourself). Be creative — use your imagination to generalize and make broad connections from your work to other ideas.

   • References/Bibliography/Citations. Full bibliographic references to any work that you cite must be listed here. Only cite work that you have explicitly made reference to in the paper.

   The paper is due in two weeks, April 15.

    

2. Art/visualization projects.

   aka, playing with the pen plotters.

   I thought we'd take advantage of the cool obsolete pen plotters we have acquired.

   So, I am assigning the following project:

   Computationally generate an image, write code that draws the image in HPGL format, write an HPGL file, and output it on the pen-plotter!

   The idea here is to create some kind of imagery that might be interesting on an 8.5 x 11” piece of paper, but would be powerful when drawn on a two-foot by three-foot sheet.

   I'd like people to explore a range of approaches, including using randomness and recursion to generate images.

   For inspiration, I'm handing out three documents:

   • the further exploits of aaron, painter, which describes the AARON computer artist / AI program created by Harold Cohen, as it existed in 1994. The AARON project was begun in 1969 and work continues to this day. Check out this java applet version of AARON.

   • A Study of User Controls in Generation of Engraved Portraits, a paper by Karthik Ramanathan and myself that describes Karthik's project that generates portraits using the lab's Roland engraver.

   • HPGL Manual, a reference guide to the HPGL language. Here are some other good links:

     commands
     wikipedia entry (includes a full, short sample HPGL program)
     another cmd summary
     yet another cmd summary
     

     One useful idea is to use the command that rescales the page to your choice of coordinates. So you could take the 36" x 24" page area and rescale it to coordinates of 1-to-150 and 1-to-100 for example.

     Also keep in mind that the plotter can change its pens, so you can draw in color.

   The AARON project suggests possibilities of using random data and algorithms to make imagery that's not abstract. Karthik's project shows one idea for what can be done using external data (i.e., an image file) as external source material.

   I'm open to pretty much anything that's computationally-based. In other words, as long as it's not something that you haven't drawn directly.

   Also, keep in mind: the LASER CUTTER also accepts HPGL, so anything that you draw can be made into a physical object.

   Please have a drawing ready to show in one week, April 8.