I love, love, love this. Such a cool project. Your explanatory video [0] is just brilliant. Amazing dedication, vision, and I suspect a whole heap of psychedelics too :-)
As usual, behind all the technology there is a team of Indians living on small cubicles doing all the hard work.
Those zebra fish workers deserve a bigger tank for its great job. Should be keep on a school as they enjoy the company of other zebra fishes and alone or in pairs aren't really happy.
They also like to swim against some currents so you can accelerate the system and put it on warp drive mode real quick. Connecting a big red button to a food deliver will do the same hyperspace effect.
Well, That's embarrassing. After a second look I must admit that the white blur could be a zebra but also other species. And the orange ones are Platys, so it seem that this project has more Mexicans that Indians.
@OP: I remember you get an interview where you explained your machine, but I can't find it. I found https://vimeo.com/871751234 that shows ore about the device, but does not explain too much. Do you have a recommendation?
This spawned an unrelated thought. Would using this source of input (a fish tank) be a good source of entropy? Would seen to me tracking fish movements would be quite random.
I dunno, I would suspect that fish would exhibit patterns when averaged over a long enough period. They probably patrol the perimeter regularly, check the same spots for food every few hours, some are territorial and will patrol their spot. They're probably not all that random. Living things tend not to be.
Repeating patterns are presumably observable on a longer time scale. If this is the case, there's multiple ways to separate higher frequencies which should provide higher entropy.
Funny - after watching this video a friend had this same thought about the lava lamps and random numbers, then I had the same thought about using a fish tank to generate random numbers.
memories of when this and oil in water on an overhead projector were the pinnacle of trippy visuals. or the interactive exhibits that would do the feed back live of whoever was standing in front of the exhibit.
The guy who invented psychedelic light painting is still living in SF and giving occasional shows -- have known him for a few years as a neighbor, ran with a pretty interesting crowd in the 60's and 70's.
Yes, it gives a notice like “Copyright issue, still alright to use.” It’s then not possible to monetize the video (no matter the number of views, I won’t make any money), and one or more ads will play on the video. Also, at the end of the description YouTube says what music is used with an image and link.
Sometimes there’s a notice saying the audio will be muted in certain countries, and some music would not be allowed at all (Beatles and Prince, for example).
Vimeo is much more lenient with no ads, and I’ll often have a video up on both YouTube and there.
Jim Crutchfield has a great video that explains the dynamics of video feedback, with really trippy music, and a paper that goes along with it, which he made with his analog video processing computer that he built at the University of California, Santa Cruz for his Ph.D. in physics in 1984.
A film by Jim Crutchfield, Entropy Productions, Santa Cruz (1984). Original U-matic video transferred to digital video. 16 minutes.
James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA.
ABSTRACT: Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposed two models for video feedback based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments.
1. In the beginning there was feedback ...
James P. Crutchfield. "Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback." Physica 10D 1984: 229-245.
Here's a paper he wrote that describes the effects in that video:
"Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback. James P. Crutchfield. Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA."
"Video feedback provides a readily available experimental system to study complex spatial and temporal dynamics. This article outlines the use and modeling of video feedback systems. It includes a discussion of video physics and proposes two models for video feedback dynamics based on a discrete-time iterated functional equation and on a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation. Color photographs illustrate results from actual video experiments. Digital computer simulations of the models reproduce the basic spatio-temporal dynamics found in the experiments."
Some interesting excerpts:
"In the beginning, I argued that a video feedback system is a space-time simulator. But a simulator of what exactly? This section attempts to answer this question as concretely as possible at this time. A very useful tool in this is the mathematical theory of dynamical systems. It provides a consistent language for describing complex temporal behavior. Video feedback dynamics, though, is interesting not only for the time-dependent behavior but also for its complex spatial patterns. In the following section I will come back to the question of whether current dynamical systems theory is adequate for the rich spatio-temporal behavior found in video feedback. This section introduces the qualitative language of dynamical systems [5], and then develops a set of discrete-time models for video feedback based on the physics of video systems. At the section's end I propose a continuum model akin to the reaction-diffusion equations used to model chemical dynamics and biological morphogenesis."
He also talks about "dislocations", which is similar to the effect of the error diffusion dithering that I love:
"A good example of quasi-attractors is the class of images displaying dislocations. This terminology is borrowed from fluid dynamics, where dislocations refer to the broken structure of convective rolls in an otherwise simple array. Dislocations are regions of broken symmetry where the flow field has a singularity. The formation of this singularity typically requires a small, but significant, energy expenditure*. In video feedback, dislocations appear as inter-digitated light and dark stripes. The overall pattern can be composed of regular parallel arrays of alternating light and dark stripes with no dislocations, and convoluted, maze-like regions where stripes break up into shorter segments with many dislocations. The boundaries between segment ends form the dislocations. They can move regularly or wander erratically. Dislocations form in pairs when a stripe breaks in two. They also annihilate by coalescing two stripes. Dislocations make for very complex, detailed patterns whose temporal evolution is difficult to describe in terms of dynamical systems because of their irregular creation and annihilation. Nonetheless, when perturbed very similar images reappear. A quasi-attractor would be associated with global features, such as the relative areas of regular stripe arrays and dislocation regions, the time-averaged number of dislocations, or the pattern's gross symmetry."
In 2022, Crutchfield and his graduate student Kyle Ray described a way to bring the heat production of conventional circuits below the theoretical limit of Landauer's principle by encoding information not as pulses of charge but in the momentum of moving particles.
While a graduate student, Crutchfield and students from the University of California, Santa Cruz (including Doyne Farmer) built a series of computers that were capable of calculating the motion of a moving roulette ball, predicting which numbers could be excluded from the outcome:
The Eudaemonic Pie / Newton's Casino: The Bizarre True Story of How a Band of Physicists and Computer Wizards Took on Las Vegas
The best link in that posting is broken but here's a good one that shows what I love so much about the blooming effects from those old vidicon tube video cameras:
Donny & Marie Osmond - Disco Finale W/ Welcome Back Kotter Cast, Karen Valentine, Hal Linden...
We were just outside of shoreline amphitheater when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying “we’ll put all our wood behind one arrowhead!” While bill joy did whippets in the back seat. No more of the greed and land grabs of the 80s. The nineties stretched ahead of us like the finely manicured green lawn surrounding Enron Headquarters, a mirage to the east.
