Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)

Not exactly circles, but famously:<p>With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Von_Neumann%27s_elephant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Von_Neumann%27s_elephant</a>

It&#x27;s really satisfying to create logomarks solely out of circles, idk why. A challenge, I guess.<p>I did a few back in my day as a designer:<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dribbble.com&#x2F;shots&#x2F;1909369-Liberty-Eagle-Arms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dribbble.com&#x2F;shots&#x2F;1909369-Liberty-Eagle-Arms</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dribbble.com&#x2F;shots&#x2F;1553151-Flint-mark-icons" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dribbble.com&#x2F;shots&#x2F;1553151-Flint-mark-icons</a><p>That first one is some of my best work.

It feels like I&#x27;m looking at the next so many Ubuntu backgrounds!

&gt; <i>Inspired by the Twitter logo, which is made from 13 perfect circles</i><p>Compared to that, the new logo doesn&#x27;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 &quot;mathematical double-struck capital X&quot; from an unknown but probably pre-existing font (apparently Monotype&#x27;s &quot;Special Alphabets 4&quot; comes close, but isn&#x27;t identical, according to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tweethunter.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-to-write-twitter-x-iphone-mac-android-windows" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tweethunter.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-to-write-twitter-x-iphone-ma...</a>).

Im curious what the process looks like to implement this. It seems like it would be easiest to <i>start</i> 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?<p>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.

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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;interestingasfuck&#x2F;comments&#x2F;txdimd&#x2F;the_twitter_logo_is_made_up_of_circles&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;interestingasfuck&#x2F;comments&#x2F;txdimd&#x2F;t...</a>

I did something similar 15+ years ago to use as an avatar in forums, twitters and some such - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swapped.ch&#x2F;#!&#x2F;personal-mark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swapped.ch&#x2F;#!&#x2F;personal-mark</a>

See also work from Schmidhuber in the mid&#x2F;late 1990s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.idsia.ch&#x2F;~juergen&#x2F;locoart&#x2F;node12.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.idsia.ch&#x2F;~juergen&#x2F;locoart&#x2F;node12.html</a>

Art with restrictions can be more interesting than without.

Because circles there also need operations over them (union, intersection or subtraction), it is a good example of low complexity art [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Low-complexity_art" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Low-complexity_art</a><p>My son is a big fan of bytebeat [2], which is also a low complexity art, but music.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dollchan.net&#x2F;bytebeat&#x2F;#4AAAA+kUryC&#x2F;X0CixswNhQyM1Q01NNTNTU2NTHbCAgZqxprahZo1xqom+RomqiYGlmaaWEQA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dollchan.net&#x2F;bytebeat&#x2F;#4AAAA+kUryC&#x2F;X0CixswNhQyM1Q01N...</a>

I never really liked Twitter but I feel oddly nostalgic for the logo now.

This guy is doing something similar for his game:<p>The Procedural Animation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qlfh_rv6khY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qlfh_rv6khY</a><p>Gibbon: Beyond the Trees - Wolfire Games <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KCKdGlpsdlo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KCKdGlpsdlo</a>

Reminds of &#x27;Drawing with circles&#x27; in 3b1b classic on Fourier series: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k</a><p>So if we remove the condition of 13, everything is in fact made of circles only!

My aunt grifted me “Animali Compassati” 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.danielenannini.it&#x2F;en&#x2F;portfolio&#x2F;animali-compassati&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.danielenannini.it&#x2F;en&#x2F;portfolio&#x2F;animali-compassat...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.compasses-zoo.net&#x2F;compasses-zoo&#x2F;index.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.compasses-zoo.net&#x2F;compasses-zoo&#x2F;index.php</a>

I miss being creative, before I knew how to make front end UIs I had crazy ideas but then became grounded. This one isn&#x27;t super crazy but I like those vertical buildings.<p>Tangent, with a dark&#x2F;colorful theme in an editor the minimap looks like a city scape

Curious how well transforms on circles could be composed to animate these animals

Maybe I missed it, but are there any instructions on how to create them...e.g. how&#x2F;where to draw the circles? It would be a fun activity with the kids.

Vaguely related and also fun: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.koalastothemax.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.koalastothemax.com&#x2F;</a> (2011)

Japanese family crests (Mon: 紋) are almost entirely made of circles (and lines, but that&#x27;s rarer)<p>Often depicting slices of vegetables, animals..<p>From few circles to hundreds

I really love the way these look. I&#x27;m imagining a short film with these characters, and it&#x27;d be a nice experiment to see how it turns out.

It bugs me than e.g. the owl&#x27;s ears benefit from a dramatic change in color that isn&#x27;t related to anything outlined by the circles.

2016…<p>This type of content is becoming rarer on the internet nowadays.

Could this be the next captcha challenge? &quot;Draw an animal out of 13 circles to prove you are human&quot;.

Reminds me of how some of the best ideas come out of working within restrictions, not in spite of them

Could an AI generate art like this and actually utilize perfect circles, to create whatever you ask?

This page feels like an AI traveled back in time and (faked) the date.<p>[edit] Nevermind. I&#x27;m being too harsh. The creator was obviously having fun and being creative. That&#x27;s cool. I think if nothing else this just proves how jaded and skeptical about clever artwork I&#x27;ve become in the past few years.

Not circles, but arcs.

Interesting.<p>What animals <i>cannot</i> be accurately depicted with 13 circles?

class Animal {<p>Circle circles_[13];<p>}

Reminds me of the time we made geometric art using a compass. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homeschoolmath.blogspot.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;geometric-art-project-seven-circle.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homeschoolmath.blogspot.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;geometric-art-pr...</a>

I tend to wonder if stuff like this is an informative boundary on AI capabilities. I mean, you can&#x27;t ask a LLM today to do that (AFAICT). &quot;Here&#x27;s a simply-specified but extremely broad search space, solve this problem in it&quot; isn&#x27;t something that fits the model. But it&#x27;s a relatively common (if not &quot;easy&quot;) task human beings like to show off.<p>What needs to change to enable this kind of exploration?