A more honest title would have been "Check out our animal shape generator", though I suppose it wouldn't sound as interesting.<p>They touch on the cool idea of using an image identification neural network to single out desired shapes from an arbitrarily large corpus of semi-random generated shapes. So the way you program your random generator could determine the style, while the identifier network would determine what will be represented.
I'm stealing one of those to use as my avatar.<p>For some inexplicable reason, I find this earth-shatteringly fascinating. If such a bewildering array of patterns can be found in random noise, maybe all patterns -- our attempts to ascribe order to the universe -- are illusive.
the shower of an apartment i rented long ago had old-school spatter tiles with small random shapes remarkably similar to the ones in the article - very close to what's in the links below, although on the ones i recall, the shapes had smoother edges and more small white dots inside the shapes<p>with the hot water enveloping me in a multi-sensory white noise, i would stand there for time=n finding faces, animals and aliens in the splotches - very zen<p><a href="http://thumbs.picclick.com/00/s/MTIwMFgxNjAw/z/9W8AAOSwmLlX5~~u/$/Z-531V-1-Pc-Vintage-Ceramic-Wall-Florida-Tile-_57.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://thumbs.picclick.com/00/s/MTIwMFgxNjAw/z/9W8AAOSwmLlX5...</a><p><a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/Z-986-1Pc-Vintage-Ceramic-Wall-Florida-Tile-4-3-8-Sky-Blue-Onyx-Textured-Gloss-/351772457457?hash=item51e745b9f1:g:uVUAAOSwRQlXdbDw" rel="nofollow">http://www.ebay.com/itm/Z-986-1Pc-Vintage-Ceramic-Wall-Flori...</a>
Awesome ! I also see a lot of living creatures in flames (try to take pictures with a DSLR during 1/2000 second ;) ), including phoenixes, seehorses and riders.