6:30pm for 7:00pm Tuesday 14th November 2006

Imperial College
Lecture Theatre 308
Department of Computing
Huxley Building
180 Queens Gate
South Kensington
London SW7 2RH

A meeting of The Computer Arts Society in association with the Dept. of Computing, Imperial College.

Abstract

For the past twenty years the AARON Program has been a rule-based "expert system," steadily accumulating higher levels of expertise in coloring its images. Its rule-base has also become increasingly detailed and complex, to the point where making changes, or adding new rules, often resulted in broken code buried elsewhere, deep in the Program.

A few months ago its author, Harold Cohen, abandoned this long-developed, highly successful system in favor of a remarkably simple algorithm, which not only performed as well as its predecessor, but also extended the range of AARON's coloring strategies. This algorithmic approach is now in its third version, and the Program exhibits a high level of control over the "kind" of coloring it does.

In this talk, Cohen describes the color technology underlying the new approach and how twenty years of accumulated expertise were collapsed into a few lines of simple code and how and why it works as well as it does.