Con las bombas que tiran los fanfarrones, se hacen las gaditanas tirabuzones (Palma y corona, Carmen Linares)

This time I draw Franky again using an algorithm to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem as I did in my last post. On this occasion, instead of doing just one single line drawing, I overlap many of them (250 concretely), each of them sampling 400 points on the original image (in my previous post I sampled 8.000 points). Last difference is that I don’t convert the image to pure black and white with threshold function: now I use the gray scale number of each pixel to weight the sample.

Once again, I use ggplot2 package, and its magical geom_path, to generate the image. The pencil effect is obtained giving a very high transparency to the lines. This is the result:

I love when someone else experiment with my experiments as Mara Averick did:

Or Erik-Jan van Kesteren:

You can do it as well with this one, since you will find the code here. Please, let me know your own creations if you do. You can find me on twitter or by email.

P.S.: Although it may seems otherwise, I’m not obsessed with Frankenstein 🙂

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road (Stephen Hawking)

Imagine a salesman and a set of cities. The salesman has to visit each one of the cities starting from a certain one and returning to the same city. The challenge is finding the route which minimizes the total length of the trip. This is the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP): one of the most profoundly studied questions in computational mathematics. Since you can find a huge amount of articles about the TSP in the Internet, I will not give more details about it here.

In this experiment I apply an heuristic algorithm to solve the TSP to draw a portrait. The idea is pretty simple:

• Load a photo
• Convert it to black and white
• Choose a sample of black points
• Solve the TSP to calculate a route among the points
• Plot the route

The result is a single line drawing of the image that you loaded. To solve the TSP I used the arbitrary insertion heuristic algorithm (Rosenkrantz et al. 1977), which is quite efficient.

To illustrate the idea, I have used again this image of Frankenstein (I used it before in this other experiment). This is the result:

You can find the code here.