Some images are not drawn directly. They follow from equations, grammars or data passed through rules. This page lists ten sources, oldest first where dated.
Visualizing 100,000 Years of Earth in WebGL
A build log for a browser globe of Earth over 100,000 years. Its images come from data passed through rules in shaders. It is useful for its concrete compression and rendering choices.
Strange Attractors
An introduction to dynamical systems and chaos, built around a Three.js particle system. It shows three short equations producing complex forms. The author describes it as accessible learning, not advanced mathematics.
Introducing LACE
Introduces a Python platform for cellular automata where links between cells follow rules too. Most of its case is made through videos. Its stronger claims about new behaviour are the author's own.
nw_wrld//dpCube[4]
The post is one caption and a video. The caption says the piece was made in TypeScript and Ableton through nw_wrld software. The video was not viewed, so the page describes the caption only.
What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators
Compares Western heraldry and Japanese mon as two ways to generate emblems. It argues that a generator should start from operations rather than a catalog of symbols. It comes from the author's work on Iron Arachne.
Autostereogram
The article covers history, construction and viewing advice for autostereograms such as Magic Eye pictures. It explains how horizontal pattern spacing and depth maps create the illusion. It cites papers and books but includes no experiments of its own.
Alternate Clock Designs & Time Systems
A small page of working clocks: decimal, binary, hexadecimal and others. Each face follows from how the day is divided. It is short and playful, and included for its question rather than its evidence.
Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era
Flint compiles short, editable chart specs into charts on five rendering backends. The README says it works as an MCP server and as an npm library. The source is project documentation with feature counts, code snippets and a release log. It offers no benchmarks.
Growing graphs
The page is an interactive simulation with a short intro. The text is very short, so this page describes only that intro. The simulation itself was not viewed.
Phloem: watch a git history grow like a slime mold
The page describes a tool that grows a slime-mold network from a public GitHub repository. The app did not load as text, so only its title and description were read. The visuals were not viewed.
Connections to other subjects
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- Visualizing 100,000 Years of Earth in WebGL and Layers of Memory, Layers of Compression, from File-based agent memory. Kellogg treats memory as a budget, where detail is spent on what matters most. Stam does that literally, giving 206 of 256 height values to the coastline's range. So what is a memory file's shoreline?
- What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators and DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs, from Checkable specs for coding agents. In heraldry, choosing the field limits what may follow. Joshi's interfaces do the same, allowing no action before a client. Blazon and a small DSL both make wrong output hard to say.
- What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators and Agent memory as a file format, from File-based agent memory. Overmyer lets a state machine run generation while a tree holds the design. Paterson keeps memory as data, apart from any pipeline. Both separate what lasts from the process that produced it.
- What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators and John Coltrane's Tone Circle, from Consonance and tuning. Overmyer asks which rules belonged to a tradition and which came afterward from its explainers. Hollander collects many readings of one Coltrane drawing. The same question applies: which of this geometry was Coltrane's?
- Alternate Clock Designs & Time Systems and Music theory for programmers, from Consonance and tuning. Both ask why a cycle has the divisions it has. The day's are inherited, de Chardon says. Haas shows the octave's twelve are a compromise. A tuning is a clock for the octave.
- Alternate Clock Designs & Time Systems and xenharmlib documentation, from Consonance and tuning. De Chardon redivides the day and shows what changes. xenharmlib does the same for the octave, with options such as 31 equal steps. Each lets you ask what a new division makes easier.
- Introducing LACE and The components of agent memory, from File-based agent memory. LACE updates links along with the cells they join. Martin's dreaming similarly rewrites wiki pages and repoints their links. What might memory do if links were state rather than navigation?
- What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators and Mathematical Patterns in African American Hairstyles, from Mathematics and optimization. Overmyer asks which rules a tradition held and which came later from explainers. Gilmer's braiders use tessellations without seeing them as mathematics. So a rule can live in the hands before anyone writes it down.
- What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators and The Secret History of Knocking on Wood, from Occult, myth and religion. Breen weighs a tidy modern origin for knocking on wood against an older, messier one. Overmyer's question applies: which story came from the tradition, and which from its explainers? Gesture, Breen notes, is rarely written down.
- Autostereogram and Photos taken inside musical instruments, from Music listening and scenes. Focus stacking inside an instrument removes depth cues, so small spaces look huge. An autostereogram goes the other way, hiding depth in a flat pattern. Together they suggest depth is inference, not sight. Both edit what the eye uses to judge distance.
Glossary
- Ableton
- A music production program used to make and play electronic music.
- Backend
- The charting library that finally draws the chart.
- Blazon
- The conventional verbal description of a coat of arms.
- Cellular automaton
- A grid whose cells update by local rules.
- Depth map
- A grayscale image whose brightness encodes distance for each point.
- Emergent complexity
- Rich behaviour that arises from simple rules without being designed in.
- Graph-rewriting automaton
- A system where rules repeatedly change the nodes and links of a graph.
- Magic Eye
- A commercial brand of random-dot autostereogram pictures and books.
- MCP server
- A program that gives an AI agent a standard way to call outside tools.
- Mon
- A Japanese emblem, often associated with a family.
- Nw_wrld
- The name of the software the post credits for making the piece.
- Semantic type
- A label saying what a data field means, such as a month or a temperature.
- Shader
- A small program that runs on the graphics processor.
- Slime mold
- A single-celled organism that grows branching networks while searching for food.
- Stereopsis
- Depth perception that arises from the slightly different views of the two eyes.
- Strange attractor
- A complex set of states that a chaotic system settles toward.
- TypeScript
- A programming language that adds types to JavaScript.
- Vega-Lite
- A grammar that describes charts as short JSON specs.
- Wall-eyed viewing
- Looking with the eyes near parallel, as if focused behind the picture.