Physics Lecture Theatre 1, Sandy Bay Campus
Summary:See how mathematics and evolution can create art with international guest Professor Daniel Ashlock.
Presenter(s):
- Professor Daniel Ashlock
Many mathematical processes can create complex and potentially artistic images. These same processes can also create an unpleasant mess and, typically, the messes outnumber things that are aesthetically pleasing. This talk will introduce, in non-technical terms, a number of examples of mathematical systems that can locate complex and hopefully aesthetically pleasing images. One of the most powerful tools for doing this is simple, digital versions of Darwin's theory of evolution. This technique is quite simple, except that an algorithm must be provided that scores images as having an enhanced chance of being interesting, beautiful, or complex. In this work, complexity is used as the target and the audience is invited to judge if beauty sometimes results. This work occurs within the field of Generative Art, but covers only a modest fraction of the techniques within that field.
Speaker profile
Daniel Ashlock has a PhD in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and currently serves as the Bioinformatics Chair in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ontario Canada. Dr. Ashlock has published on evolved art, bioinformatics, game theory, optimization, knowledge representation, evolutionary computation, mathematics education, ecological modelling, and thermal systems engineering. The broad range of topics comes from aggressive collaboration with domain experts that need adaptive computational tools tailored to their problems. Dr. Ashlock is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the IEEE Transactions on Games, the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and Biosystems. He is a past chair of the IEEE Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee and of the IEEE Technical Committee on Games. Dr. Ashlock has won awards for undergraduate and graduate teaching and research excellence. He has in excess of 250 peer-reviewed scientific publications and is always interested in being introduced to a new field.
Dr. Ashlock is a visiting scholar hosted by the School of Technology, Environments and Design. www.utas.edu.au/technology-environments-design
