A couple of my students have created a cool web page that lets you create beautiful lace patterns with a few clicks of a mouse. Well, pictures of lace patterns, but you can print out instructions for crocheting them.
It also lets you create really ugly laces, but if you keep rating the patterns it creates it will learn (via an evolutionary technique) what patterns people think look nice and be able to produce more of them. Try it out!
>A couple of my students have created a cool web page that lets you create beautiful lace patterns
Maybe you should have wrote "... *evolve* beautiful lace patterns."
Impressive! Seems they must not only be good programmers, but also able to understand lace. If the typical lace recipe is as awful as the typical knitting recipe, then I'm doubly impressed.
A note on the evolution project, though. There are many different ways a pattern can be nice which are not compatible. Does the project implement speciation? If, during recombination, only somewhat similar patterns could "breed", perhaps we could avoid the noise from patterns that exploit a completely different survival strategy :-)
OT
where'd the gravatars go?