Escher Circuits. What if you could compute the output of complex algorithms just by viewing an image?
Our everyday visual perceptions rely upon unfathomably complex computations carried out by tens of billions of neurons across over half our cortex. In spite of this, it does not “feel” like work to see. Our cognitive powers are, in stark contrast, “slow and painful,” and we have great trouble with embarrassingly simple logic tasks.
Might it be possible to harness our visual computational powers for other tasks, perhaps for tasks cognition finds difficult? I have recently begun such a research program with the goal of devising ways of converting digital logic circuits into visual stimuli – “visual circuits” – which, when presented to the eye, “tricks” the visual system into carrying out the digital logic computation and generating a perception that amounts to the “output” of the computation. That is, the technique amounts to turning our visual system into a programmable computer.
posted by scalefree
on Mar 29, 2010 -
57 comments
Gödel, Escher, Bach, Tumblr Gödel, Escher, Bach, Tumblr is an online book group. We're reading one chapter a week of Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 masterpiece book about artificial intelligence, mathematics, consciousness, puzzles, music, and language. They've been reading since the start of the month, so start in the
archive.
[Previously, More Previously, Event more previously, Previously in the future]
posted by Deathalicious
on Jan 20, 2010 -
33 comments
Fascination with
ground and figure carries on in various fields after
The Rubin vase / face Illusion,
M.C. Escher, and
Marshall McLuhan.
Besides being extremely important in the fields of
photography and
poetry, the figure/ground relationship is important to physicist
Paul Davies, who says "the true miracle of nature is to be found in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos, a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter, and consciousness to emerge from life."
Also, Peter Grundy and Yiang Yan discuss how
contextual ground relates to linguistic figure in Bill Clinton's famous apology,
Andrew Graydon plays with the distinction between sound as environment and sound as music, and W.C. Richardson creates
paintings in which "positive and negative spaces seem unstable; figure becomes ground, ground becomes figure."
posted by Aghast.
on Aug 12, 2006 -
3 comments
Snakes. An animated film based on a woodcut by M.C. Escher. Slow to load, beautiful to watch (and listen to).
posted by jonah
on Jan 28, 2004 -
16 comments
