Name: Computing With Art - Computerphile
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T16:57:22.000Z
Duration: 11 min 38 s
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can paintings compute and it's it's a broader theme in terms of

What are the links between physics and chemistry and biology and computing and indeed art?

So I worked with somebody called Linda Jackson who's a local nottingham artist

She'd started to play with something called acrylic pouring where basically you take different types of paint

You put them down onto a canvas you let them mix and you let them dry and you end up with what I think

Incredibly striking an incredibly beautiful patterns like this sort of foam

Scientifically called cellular networks where you can see these cells on different lens scales and right across the board in terms of different colors

Etc. Those types of patterns are absolutely ubiquitous in nature right across very very large scale and scales

The large-scale structure the universe in terms of our galaxies are distributed

best thought of his in terms of a cellular network or this type of

Foam like structure all the way down to the really really really small and we're in nanoscience group

So we're very very keen on the really really small

We took a droplet of this which are nanoparticles five nanometers across

Tiny tiny particles of gold drop them onto a surface and let the solvent

Left us with patterns like this. So these are not the individual particles themselves

This is what the particles do in terms of how they collect together and how they dry and you end up with these

incredible cellular type patterns which are

something like if you compare this with this in terms of the length scale, this is on a length scale about

25,000 times smaller. This is a microscope emits an atomic force microscope image

So you're sitting there as a computer file if you were going

Okay, that's nice who's talking about science and he's talking about art. When's he gonna start talking about the computing?

There are strong links here in terms of the physics and the chemistry of these patterns

But the question is can you compute with curtains?

can you compute with art the question here is not can we you know generate something that does much much better than

Silicon technology CMOS technology in terms of the speed or the processing power, etc

so it's about thinking about different main sets and it's a broader and I would say more philosophical question what is information and

It's a lovely piece of art what sort of computational problem can a piece of art like that solve?

Not really to do with colors much more to do with patterns in that we could just take all strip all the colors from this

And just make it black and white or even to a certain extent almost binary I said, but what's remarkable?

Is that the physical process which is underlying the art here?

across a district or a county or indeed across the country and you

Want to think about the catchment area for those skills?

Dividing up the land in terms of catchment areas the fairest way and to do that we use an approach from computational geometry

Compute pretty straightforwardly, in fact, a lot of languages MATLAB included basically have the command built-in

So there's a distribution of points. It's fairly ordered

What we want to do is for each one of these points on here. We want to find the region that is

Closest to that particular point basically we want to divide this up as fairly as possible

So mathematically this is actually an geometrically is actually straightforward problem. So what we do is we connect up

One of the points to all its nearest neighbors and then what we do is we take the

Perpendicular bisectors, let's do that. So ones there

Ones here. So we're bisecting these lines and ones there

Ones there if you'll excuse the wobbly drawing

So what we have is that this area or the points within here are the closest to that point? Okay?

This is like numberphile stuff come on, it does feel like numberphile, but we're going to do a computation

I promise at the end and we're going to do a physical computation

I promise what you'd end up with then as you can see is just a set of hexagons

Let's take a less ordered set and a somewhat more

Natural set perhaps this is actually from a paper by Meredith P Richards and what she did was look at

Washington, I believe if I remember correctly

This is what it actually looks like the black dots are where the schools are and the question then is how would you divide up?

Neighborhoods or the areas of the district that is served by each school

The algorithm is exactly as we've just done for that ordered set is you connected up

You connect a given point to its nearest neighbors

You take the perpendicular bisectors and you divide up the plane that way that's the fairest way of

Dividing up the land as it where I found being kind of picky here

I'm gonna suggest that perhaps some of those are more densely populated than others

Is that too complicated for this? So that's a really good point Sean

We're making a number of different assumptions here or assuming that the density of the population is the same right across the board

Obviously there are complications in terms of even transport links etcetera. There's a wide range of different contributions

we're going to do what all good physicists do even computational physicists and

approximate cows a large sphere PI's around three

Density population density is even across the board. We can set up a computer program to solve this. It's relatively straightforward

Here's Nottingham. That's probably - higher density of points for schools. But I don't know. Let's say it's coffee shops

Well, what wanted to do is to try and work out was your closest coffee shop, which is the closest coffee shop to you

Actually to do a Verona tessellation and so here's our points

Just taking away the map and we can calculate the Verona tessellation and it looks like that so again

It's not an ordered distribution of points. Therefore. We see a range of different polygons ranging from adult

See if we can see a triangle in there. I don't think so

I think the smallest is four-sided maybe up to seven or eight sided cells

Okay, so where is the physical computation well we can do it on a computer

This is now a computer. This is a physical computer. And what we're going to do is going to take a droplet of these particles

Put it on a surface let the solvent evaporate

And what's going to happen? Is that those?

Particles are going to be carried by the tide of the solvent and get pushed together and they're going to create our own

Verona tessellation, let me show you exactly what I mean with a simulation

So the yellow dots here are the nanoparticles one question you might ask is. Well, I can't if I hold it up

oh, they're definitely nanoparticles and there are most definitely

Nanoparticles in it. In fact, we did a sixty simplest video on this some time ago. You might ask