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https://github.com/rogerallen/tweegeemee

Twitter Genetic Algorithm Imagery
https://github.com/rogerallen/tweegeemee

clojure generative-art genetic-algorithms heroku imagery twitter

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Twitter Genetic Algorithm Imagery

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README 

        
# tweegeemee (트의기미)



A Clojure library designed to breed images via twitter and other social media.  



Since it was written in 2015, this library has grown and matured into a larger system of parts.  There is now a website http://tweegeemee.com, an underlying database and as of December, 2022 posting to Mastodon has begun.  While those other pieces are not open source, this code will remain open source.



Adding Mastodon support is forcing me to rearchitect a few things to use a real database instead of the current gist-based "database" that I have historically used.  I'm calling this "Version 2.0" and we wil be deprecating the gist file use going forward.  Docs probably won't be updated to keep up with these changes...unless I get requests from interested developers.



UPDATE: as of Version 2.3.0 I no longer include the code to post to Twitter and I no longer read data from gists either.  I'm using a real DB for the gist function and just put images into the images directory.  Look back in the git revision history to before V2.0 if you want to see that code.



## Background



Each tweet has a name based on the timestamp of creation with a suffix

at the end, a link to a github gist and a hashtag (currently #ProceduralArt).



The link to a github gist highlights the code used to create the image.



Follow, Favorite and Retweet [tweegeemee](https://twitter.com/tweegeemee)

images to select them for future generations.



Currently posting a set of two new images every hour. The suffix at

the end of the image name tells you generation-type: a,b are random;

C,D are sexually reproduced and M,N are mutants with only one parent.



For reproduction, the last 200 tweets are considered. The top 5 are

allowed to produce offspring.



Oh, what is "트의기미"?  That is the Korean (Hangul) characters for

twee (트의) gee (기) mee (미).  I believe it is just a nonsense word

and liked the look of it.



Let's see where this goes...



## Background



A while back, I saw [Carin Meier's](https://github.com/gigasquid)

["How I Start" post](https://howistart.org/posts/clojure/1) about

running a Clojure-based twitter bot on Heroku. She showed how easy it

was to get this working, I was intrigued and decided I'd like to give

it a try--but with my own twist.



In the back of my mind, something I've always wanted to do was

experiment with image generation via lisp s-expressions as [Karl

Sims](http://www.karlsims.com) did in his ['91 Siggraph

paper](http://www.karlsims.com/papers/siggraph91.html).  But, how to

decide what constitutes a "good" image to breed?  Well, how about

using Twitter retweets and favorites for scoring?



I found the [Clisk clojure image

library](https://github.com/mikera/clisk) was perfect for recreating

Sims' imagery.  I also took some inspriration from

https://github.com/nodename/clevolution,

http://www.thattommyhall.com/2013/08/23/genetic-programming-in-clojure-with-zippers/

and http://blog.raynes.me/blog/2011/12/02/waving-our-tentacles/.



So far, this has been quite fun to work on.



## Usage



You should be able to clone/fork this library, follow the "How I

Start" post and get this running on Heroku.  Note that as of version

1.3, due to Heroku free dynos now requiring 6 hours of sleep in a 24

hour period, I switched to using the Scheduler add-on.  See [Issue

11](https://github.com/rogerallen/tweegeemee/issues/11) for more

information.



If you just want to create & breed your own imagery, see the bottom of

core.clj for snippets to generate & show a random image, breed images

by hand and mutate images.



### Making your own images



Perhaps you'd like to reproduce one of the images posted?  Maybe, you

want a desktop background or something like that?



First, click that tweet's link to go to the github gist data structure.  For example,



```clj

 { :name "150613_061332_D.clj" :hash -504503564 :image-hash -1696445894

   :code (clisk.live/vdivide (clisk.live/vfrac (clisk.live/vmin (clisk.live/v+ (clisk.live/alpha clisk.live/grain) [-0.9438 0.4027 2.3753 1.7962]) (clisk.live/sigmoid (clisk.live/vfloor [0.4416 -2.6627 -1.6566])))) (clisk.live/gradient (clisk.live/square (clisk.live/v- [-0.2226 -2.2105 -2.7124 -1.7799] clisk.live/vsnoise))))

 }

```



Second, copy the info after the :code keyword to the end of the line.  e.g. `(clisk.live/vdivide ... )`



Next, load up a repl and paste the clipboard contents in to define a variable `code` after a (important!) single quote like so:



```clj

=> (def code '(clisk.live/vdivide (clisk.live/vfrac (clisk.live/vmin (clisk.live/v+ (clisk.live/alpha clisk.live/grain) [-0.9438 0.4027 2.3753 1.7962]) (clisk.live/sigmoid (clisk.live/vfloor [0.4416 -2.6627 -1.6566])))) (clisk.live/gradient (clisk.live/square (clisk.live/v- [-0.2226 -2.2105 -2.7124 -1.7799] clisk.live/vsnoise))))

   )

=> (show (eval code) :width 720 :height 720)

```



To save an image, do



```clj

(write-png "nice_one.png" (image (eval code) :width 720 :height 720))

```



## License



Copyright © 2015-2022 Roger Allen



Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at

your option) any later version.