Well, it’s complicated; more on that (including preliminary results) over the weekend, hopefully.

Briefly, in preparing an image library extension and some demos (breeding programs that play cards) for the genetic programming system I’m working on with Jesse Sielaff and Trek Glowacki, we’re putting the Nudge language extensions through their paces.

As you know, Bob, one of the most important checks for representational brittleness in genetic programming involves having a poke round with a mess of random programs. You want to know whether every arbitrary ordering and juxtaposition is valid… but you can’t. So instead you create huge pile of random structures, on the off chance that some odd combination of syntactic elements will crop up.

If you skip this step—even with a downloaded library—you’re a baaaaaad genetic programmer. Turn in your copy of Jaws and go back to machine learning land.

Anyway. For the library we’re writing in this image-handling demo, we’re depending on good old sturdy but impenetrable ImageMagick. In this case, for brittleness checking, one needs to make a few hundred thousand random image manipulation scripts.

Just because it appealed to me, I jammed a few thousand together into a quick loop.

Oh, and DO NOT WATCH IF YOU’RE EPILEPTIC; DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPERATE MACHINERY, INCLUDING COMPUTERS, WHILE WATCHING THIS VIDEO; WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGE TO FOVEA OR TEMPORARY AUTOTOPAGNOSIA.