Mr. Picasso Head

Here is yet another bit of interactive silliness. Mr. Picasso Head lets you move eyes and noses around on a canvas and put together a portrait. It's the same idea as the South Park character generator, only more pretentious.

The basic strategy is "try a bunch of things and see which one you like best." The problem is that the "try a bunch of things" part is very time-consuming, while the "see which one you like best" is very easy.

To take this strategy to the next level, you need a metric. A metric is a measurement, a number, something that can be calculated by the computer. For example if you have a million pictures, your metric could be the number of different colors.

Once you have a metric, you have the computer generate a bazillion different things, calculate the metric, and use the metric to generate a top 10 list. Now the human comes in and looks over the top 10 list and picks the one he likes best. The computer does what it is good at, the human does what he is good at.

Evolution works something like this. The organisms generate a bunch of different things by shuffling their genes, and nature applies the metric of survival.

Regruntled is something like this, too. I'm putting a bunch of stuff in the blog, and my metric is the comments and visitor count. The volume is still low enough that I can read every comment, but I have a computer count the visitors.