Computing With Art - Computerphile

After a recent collaboration with an artist, Professor Moriarty is exploring whether the physics within patterns and art can be exploited for computation.

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[otakuribo]

Numberphile + Sixty Symbols + Computerphile = a more ambitious crossover than Infinity War

[AlwinMao]

A lot of comments disparage the examples shown in the video but the point isnt the specific examples but rather the way of thinking. Can we use beautiful behaviors in nature, capture them, and by analogy solve problems? Spaghetti sort. Light bulbs as the earliest nbody gravity solvers. Slimes growing to resemble highways. beauty as function in the animal world helps us optimize shapes for flight and flow. Analog computers or mechanisms that can do more. Can we use bacteria to compute, using their DNA? Can we use the physics of quantum mechanics to do problem X? The point is that we can use other disciplines to help us understand computable problems or in rare cases to do the computation more cheaply. This is most useful for problems we dont know how to do well, like factoring or protein folding, and esp. useful for thinking about problems that people havent even started to imagine using a computer for, because it would be too hard. Some leeway needs to be given to account for what the video leads to but is very difficult to imagine.

[AaditDoshi]

A video on shaders would be pretty cool. It's about programming materials and effects. They use a lot of cool tricks.

[davidfisher]

Nature creates cells that assign areas to nearest point. Voronoi invents an algorithm to reproduce that. Physicist is impressed by nature's ability to reproduce the algorithm that reproduces nature?

Can it compute? No, it just grows/shrinks. What question can it answer other than the one it embodies?

[blomeupday]

It would seem this would be more of making art out of computing than vice versa. You are dictating the spaces for the art based on the computation. You manipulated the surface based on computation instead of achieving any data from random art that would be useful in any possible way. Then the question becomes why even involve art when it’s not necessary for computation?

[BaronSloth]

The School map is Loudoun County in Northern Virginia.

[jellyfishbones]

In structural engineering they can also use physical analogies for computation. Hanging a chain between two points will give you a curve that is the ideal shape for an arch (say for a bridge or a wide doorway).

[rampagingFurniture]

Reminds me of how a scientist simulated the most efficient possible transit routes between key locations using slime mold growth.

[SKyrim]

Sorry to be close-minded but...I don't get it...this voronoi tessellation seems to be already solved by our algorithms...why have the trouble of dealing with nanoparticles and solvents and whatnot to do a "physical computation" of something that is already computed? Maybe a little motivation with some other idea that would solve a "hard" computational problem physically could be nice

[ssamiuddin]

Man, just the passion in every Computerphile video! So addictive!

[MrRyanroberson]

this comes out shortly after news that analogue computing is about to make a comeback using photonic reflection patterns to solve calculus

[arcanics]

Brady's channels are leaking into one another!

[Vladimir_Lemon]

There exists an esoteric programming language called Piet that uses art to compute.

[hirakmondal]

It's in those interdisciplinary areas that the low hanging fruits are lying.. :)

[mheermance]

Aren't all computers ultimately physical computers?

[laptop]

I thought this was going to be on McMillen's SIGBOVIK 2019 paper "93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs"

[RickeyBowers]

Making smaller substrate features in the production of microprocessors might benefit from a similar technique - lithography creates patterns at one scales, while physical computational processes modify that structure to produce complex structure at a lower scale. Some work has been done in this area with high power lasers, but there are many possibilities.

[GijsvanDam]

"a cow is a large sphere, pi is around 3" Did I hear that correctly?

[arirahikkala]

Scott Aaronson's "NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality" is a great way to get into more depth on this subject. Actually, I'd love to see the soap bubble experiment on the channel, I'm not sure I've ever seen it actually done on video. I mean, not that that's the important part, but it would be cool to see anyway.

[pierreabbat]

It's "Voronoi" with the stress on the last syllable. I heard "Veronae".