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JS1k demo: “Highway at Night”

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Re: JS1k demo: “Highway at Night”

#44

Yikes - this took me right back to writing M68000 bootsector demo/loaders on my AtariST in the 80's. Happy times. I sometimes wish there was still more of that creative free-for-all spirit in todays UI's. To think of the computing power we have now compared to then - it's slightly saddening to see how conservative and often ugly the interfaces we use are.

At least the desktop isn't lime green! ;)

Curious: Does any of your work survive?

Re: JS1k demo: “Highway at Night”

#45

this was really beautiful. I almost blurted out it was art but then I was forced to remember we can't call computer generated things art by some hidden rule.

A great deal of people don't see what can be distilled down to pure logic and math as being a valid form of art. They believe there is something beyond the physical world which art can reach out and touch. They are incorrect and most would back down immediately if they were talking about it in person.

Programming is a form of art, to me.

Re: JS1k demo: “Highway at Night”

#46
post #3

The making of "Highway at Night": http://jsriffs.blogspot.fi/2014/05/making-of-highway-at-nigh...

The visual trickery is fun. I hadn't noticed that only the centre lines on the road glow until reading that, nor had I noticed that the street lights don't actually have a thin line linking the pole and the light.

Re: JS1k demo: “Highway at Night”

#47
post #5

You can see all the submissions at http://js1k.com/2014-dragons/demos My favorite: http://js1k.com/2014-dragons/demo/1868

Some of the other demo's quickly makes my Macbook Pro's fan make noise. This cute 3d demo can go on forever without any noise. And it even has reflection and (fake) shadows.

That's because it uses WebGL and not Canvas2D.

Re: JS1k demo: “Highway at Night”

#48

this was really beautiful. I almost blurted out it was art but then I was forced to remember we can't call computer generated things art by some hidden rule.

A big part of it is framing. If you frame something as a tech demo, that's how it's going to be recieved. 'The Art World' does seem reasonably open to stuff like this, but you really have to go out of your way to make sure people know "hey this is art, please interpret it as an Artwork, here's a chunk of text explaining the conceptual backdrop for this piece, here's how it fits into my wider practice, thank you". But with that perhaps you would risk alienating a big chunk of the HN crowd.

Re: JS1k demo: “Highway at Night”

#49
post #32
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principal component analysis and then ignoring the least important components is the only compression technique I know. Hope it helps.

Well that is a lossy compression, can work nicely to some data (e.g. images), but totally irrelevant in the context of source code compression.

Well, he didn't say he only wanted non-lossy compression or that he was working on source code compression.

Re: JS1k demo: “Highway at Night”

#50
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can the human brain remember hours of highway trips in basically 3 pounds of fat without using some tricks to convert the information in to geometric 3d shapes? The developer who created this demo also know how to do it the other way round, he can write javascript that generate simple geometric shapes and animated transitions in javascript that generates a pretty good rendition of a highway trip at night.

I doubt that (all) humans think in javascript :P Im sure the brain has its tricks, but they dont need to have something in common with the ones used here. I wonder what Kolmogorov Complexity this program has. Obviously <= 1023.

How does Kolmogorov Complexity deal with the fact that you're specifying that number within a certain execution context (in this case JavaScript)? Otherwise you could simply reduce the program to a single bit and have an interpreter that includes the original program as a primitive. This program without the libraries that it accesses would be a lot larger than it is.

Also, shouldn't the number be expressed in bits rather than bytes?

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