Ken Stanley: Discovery Without Objectives

I don't think this algorithm is very common. In particular, the colour palette can usually be chosen last , and a lot of generative art (at least all that shown in the article) will not need multiple resolution passes. I think a more common discovery/refinement process is to go from more random to less random, or random in particular kinds of ways. For example, you can specify the values or distributions (or at least ranges of values) for particular parameters based on things you think will look good or which should end up similar in ways you like to things you've found already. Generative art is a search in an extremely high dimensional space. The more you go into it aiming for something in particular, the more nailed down it is and the closer to traditional art (and the harder to pull off well IMHO, think how much difference slightly changing the position of one of the elements in these images would make, versus slightly changing the position of someone's eye). If you go looking for "new and interesting" or "looks good" without really aiming for anything in particular, it can be a lot easier to find good things. I've seen a couple of really interesting talks recently about the surprising successfulness of objective-less search by Ken Stanley: [link] (40 min.) [this video] (90 min.) He started off looking at human-directed machine-evolved generative art, and ended up with a far more general discovery.