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For the past two days I was implementing RandomArt algorithm on Twitch. You can find the source code in here github.com/tsoding/rand... It's a pretty cool idea that generates this kind of images.

The idea is that you have function F: [-1..1]² → [-1..1]³ which giving a xy coordinates between -1 and 1 gives you an RGB value. So you generate an image by sampling the function with whatever resolution you need. For example F(x, y) = (x, x, x) gives you horizontal gray gradient.

What we do is we generate a random F. We do that by literally generating random syntactical tree of mathematical expressions based on a context-free grammar. So you evaluate F by literally interpreting the syntactical tree like an interpreted scripting language.

So essentially, the whole RandomArt idea is to generate Random Images by generating Random Programs that generate those images in a Small Custom Interpreted Mini-Language. It's actually a really cool Recreational Programming exercise due to it being so interdisciplinary. Really recommend. 👍