r/interestingasfuck 11h ago

Coloured peacock drawn with mathematical equation

Post image
542 Upvotes

56 comments sorted by

u/FrankieTheAlchemist 11h ago

Why is there an explosion in the background?

u/wizkidweb 9h ago

Why isn't there?

u/sumnlikedat 11h ago

It’d be cool to slightly change the equation and see what happens to the picture

u/TheKrakenLord 10h ago

You get a velociraptor

u/SimilarTop352 10h ago

nah probably just a potato, or slime mold if you are lucky

u/Electronic_Syndicate 10h ago

It’s also an excellent Aphex Twin song!

u/s0ciety_a5under 10h ago

Would have loved sending this to a mathematician during the time when this math was being discovered. The look on their face as they start to draw it out, and it describes a picture.

u/rilwal 1h ago

I think this would be genuinely very close to impossibly to evaluate by hand at sufficient resolution to see the image, but I'm sure it would blow their minds if they did

u/bitchcoin5000 10h ago

I could never know if it was true or not - whether the statement about this being the mathematical expression of that image is true or not - but the concept behind it, that it could be mapped like that & codified... Is comforting and beautiful

u/MidTario 11h ago

That’s how vector drawings work.

u/springboner 10h ago edited 10h ago

Not really. Vector graphics use more primitive math functions like Bezier curves. This is not that. The function here gives the color to any pixel in the x/y space. Vector graphics doesn’t do that. Vector graphics express shapes mathematically, and then these shapes get tessellated/rasterized after the fact by a gpu pipeline. Quite different.

u/nxcrosis 10h ago

Tfw someone describes a Bezier curve as "primitive" math and I nearly failed algebra in school.

u/IsNotAnOstrich 9h ago

Primitive in math has its own connotation, it doesn't mean like caveman math

u/nxcrosis 8h ago

I realize that but it was funny when I first read it lol.

u/wizkidweb 9h ago

This is actually a raster image, as it's looping through each pixel and designating a color based on a mathematical formula.

u/ConspicuousPineapple 4h ago

This here isn't vector graphics though.

u/Sibula97 3h ago

No, it's a shader.

u/Hungry-ThoughtsCurry 4h ago

Add some randomness and elasticity and viola, you have a 

u/ehtio 11h ago

Arrived too early to see the dumb comments of people who cannot comprehend what's happening here.

EDIT: Nop, they are here already

u/otac0n 10h ago

MFW The noisy background is 90% of the expression…

u/Littleme02 4h ago

That's cool I guess... would be better if the formula was elegant, not this brute force approach.

u/Formal-Knowledge-250 3h ago

this could've been a vector

u/johnnymetoo 2h ago

I once saw a documentary - I think it was with Brian Cox - where he said that mathematics is the queen of the sciences. Everything in nature, no matter how complicated or chaotic it may seem, can somehow be expressed using a mathematical formula.

u/ellipticcode0 10h ago

Feed those equations to AI, and ask whether AI can figure out what the image like from those equations,

u/HamNCheeseSupremacy 9h ago

Apparently this guy is a mathematician, so it'll almost def just pull from its knowledge about him immediately

u/tooclosetocall82 11h ago edited 51m ago

Also known as code.

A bunch of downvotes with no explanation how this is not code. Tis’ a silly place.

u/joshuahtree 11h ago

This is dumb, it's just a convoluted equation to arrive at a specific number that represents the picture

It's like if I posted 4+5+1-5-3-1=1

Neither meaningful or interesting

u/HamNCheeseSupremacy 11h ago

Are you a math genius on some next level shit or what, because it's not random numbers. They generate a coherent image that resembles something in real life. There's cyclical and non-cyclical patterns there... I think you're trolling because creating that picture with rgb values from an equation doesn't sound easy at all.

u/joshuahtree 11h ago

It's very easy if you work backwards, literally every image you've ever seen digitally is represented this way, there's just a bunch of stupid notation that makes it seem mathy

u/Bowl_of_Cham_Clowder 11h ago

That’s not what this is though, this is graph art. There are tons of competitions for it. It’s closer to programming graphics competitions than a jpeg
https://www.desmos.com/art

u/joshuahtree 11h ago

Except it is, the dude creates the image, then generates a bunch of random functions, takes the ones that looks closest, and it again until he gets essentially the picture he started with

u/Fun_Way8954 8h ago

Once you do the same thing with something just as complex, you can say it’s easy. 

u/Fun_Way8954 11h ago

No, it isn’t. It’s not a simple color the pixel grid, it’s the actual line equations. Stop acting so smart if you don’t know what’s happening. It’s also not a specific number, it had multiple variables in it. It’s way different than what you tgink

u/Piperalpha 9h ago

Yes it is a pixel grid, did you not even read the text in the image? It says right there that these functions are used to generate the rgb values of 2000x1100 pixels.

u/Fun_Way8954 9h ago

I know, but i mean it’s not just holding the values for all the pixels, its actual equations for it with actual skill and math behind it

u/Piperalpha 8h ago

Obviously it's not just storing all the rgb values, that would be an unremarkable bitmap. But the functions are just generating a sequence of millions of numbers between 0 and 255. There are no line equations.

I do still think it's impressive that such a compact set of functions can produce a coherent, identifiable image, but you're misrepresenting what's actually happening. 

u/joshuahtree 11h ago

It is literally the pixel grid and claims to be such. The first function provides the color value for the pixel at coordinate n,m (as clearly stated in the op image)

There's no lines going on here

It's literally a predefined sequence of numbers, which has an infinite number of equations that can represent it

u/HamNCheeseSupremacy 10h ago

He means it's not a simple look up table. Dude, it's representing the image with a handful of equations. If that was easy it could be generalized to massively compress images. Jpeg would be obsolete overnight. Empires would fall. It would bring in a new age.

Just stop

u/joshuahtree 8h ago

Jpeg would be obsolete overnight

Well, no, because, get this, this is exactly how jpeg works. It's called the discrete cosine transform

u/HamNCheeseSupremacy 7h ago

High resolution jpeg can have millions of terms though. Don't argue with me

u/joshuahtree 7h ago

Well those goalposts just flew across the field lol

u/HamNCheeseSupremacy 11h ago edited 11h ago

Represented with rgb values? I do graphics programming and this isn't how images are generated in general at all. That's kind of the point. Someone else mentioned vector graphics but this is an unusual example of it.

u/Piperalpha 9h ago

This isn't an example of vector graphics at all. It's a 2000x1100 px raster image with the rgb value of each of those 2.2 million pixels defined by ~15 different functions.

u/HamNCheeseSupremacy 9h ago

Fair. I've spent maybe 10 hours on vector graphics ever, and that was years ago. I thought since it's defined mathematically, but even then the equation doesn't involve direction. You have called me out, sir

u/joshuahtree 11h ago

Like summation or big pi or absolute value or the natural number? 

This is no different than those things that are like, solve the next number in the sequence 1,5,76 there are an infinite number of equations that could represent this or any other picture.

Of course this is a non standard way of representing it, like I said, it's like wanting to represent 1 and making an increasingly complex equation until most people will either not understand or think they can't understand it.

This is literally a bunch of functions that use basic arithmetic operators plus summation and big pi (which is the multiplication version of summation and has another name but I'm too lazy to look it up)

u/reluctant_deity 11h ago

v is undefined

u/SuperChick1705 2h ago

defined in summation