120: Dissociated Garfield

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Dissociated Garfield

Made by: Henning Makholm

Explanation

This comic is unexplained. If you can edit this page to provide an explanation, please do!

The author writes:

Taking "remixed Garfield strips" fairly literally, I created these three strips using a generalisation of the Dissociated Press algorithm to two dimensions. Here is how it works, more or less:

1. Construct a source image consisting of all regular non-Sunday Garfield strips from 2007, forced into a common 216-color palette. (Avoid dithering; that gives bad results).
2. Generate the pixels of the output image in pseudo-random order, as follows:
3. Set N=32 and find the N pixels closest to the target pixel coordinates that have already been generated.
4. Locate all pixels in the source image that have exactly the same colours in the same relative positions as the neighbour pixels found in step 3
5. If no source pixels were found in step 4, decrease N by one and start over from step 3.
6. Otherwise, set the target pixel to the colour of a randomly chosen one among those found in step 4.

I generated a dozen-odd images—each takes about 6 hours of CPU time—and selected the most interesting ones. They tend to be more chaotic than I had hoped (and increasing the initial N does not seem to help), but still they are not complete failures.

Transcript

{A series of interesting modern-art-looking coloured images, with vague hints of Garfield and Jon in them.}