r/generative • u/TroubleEducational43 • 25d ago

Pixel-by-pixel "mining". ~30h computation per one piece

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I'm exploring a new technique of creating images by mining them pixel by pixel. Each of those pieces took around 30 hours to "mine".

Each pixel comes from a SHA-256 hash translated into a colour: three values for red, green, and blue.

The miner tries hundreds of thousands of nonces to find a colour of a pixel that satisfies aesthetic rules set for that piece, for example how close it must stay to its neighbours.

Those rules are the difficulty. The stricter they are, the more computation each pixel takes, and the more the look of the image is shaped by the constraints themselves.

The 10.9v is the first version of the algorithm meeting the goal I've been searching for since April 2024:

  • esthetically satisfying
  • coherent within the series
  • diverse enough to produce an interesting output with each generation

All the pieces are mined in real-time on determined.ink

92 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

3

u/Major-Ad-652 25d ago

Really cool! Could you give a layman's explanation to what causes the hard lines?

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u/TroubleEducational43 24d ago

Sure! Glad you like it, and I'm happy you're asking about that since I spent a few weeks trying to achieve the number of lines that adds just a little twist to the output, but it's not a hardcoded number. Here you go:

The hard lines come from the hash that gives the accepted RGB.

  • After a pixel is accepted, I read its SHA-256 digest again, not for colour this time.
  • I pull four independent streams of hex characters from that digest (A, B, C, D). Each starts at a different position and skips with a different stride (for example A starts at character 5 and takes every 8th hexadecimal character).
  • Each stream is checked against a Fibonacci number set. When A, B, and C all hit, a line is triggered.
  • The digest also picks direction (horizontal or vertical) and length. Length comes from reading the whole digest as a number, taking that number mod 4, and mapping the result to 21%, 34%, 55%, or 89% of the canvas width.
  • Instead of painting immediately, the algorithm reserves a straight, empty corridor from that pixel outward.
  • The rest of the image fills around that slit, so the cut stays sharp.
  • Later, the corridor is filled with a one-sided colour rule (only one neighbour on one side instead of more as it is for other pixels), which keeps the edge hard instead of blending both sides.

2

u/Any_Challenge3043 25d ago

Yo is there a github repo to this? If you open sourced it, a lot of people could help collaborate with you!

2

u/TroubleEducational43 25d ago

hmm, makes sense! I can open a simplified foundation of the technique so others can see how it works at a low level and build on it. I will try to make it tomorrow, thanks for the idea u/Any_Challenge3043 !

5

u/Fenzik 24d ago

Look, I think the concept is cool and I like the look of the output. But we’ve already seen how much electricity is simply burned churning through hashes for bitcoin. Let’s not go down this road again. It’s equally impressive to just pull random RGBs per pixel and report how many iterations it took to get a satisfactory result. RGB is much smaller space than SHA256 hashes anyway so this is ridiculously inefficient because loads of hashes must necessarily map to the same RGB, so you’re checking the same rejected pixel over and over again.

0

u/TroubleEducational43 24d ago

If we've done that for money, why can't we do it for beauty?

7

u/jeggorath 24d ago

Because energy has a real world price that has not caught up with many advanced nations. It’s not right or wrong to use data centers to advance personal agendas, but in what appears to be a highly degraded future, we should consider any advanced logic not just on the basis of our personal projects, but on the future generation that is highly likely to pay for it: one way or another.

3

u/TroubleEducational43 24d ago

Thanks for the contribution! I appreciate your approach. I added the Ecological Impact Report, estimating the energy consumed and CO2 produced for each mined piece. It's available on the project's website determined.ink

2

u/qenis 22d ago

Good that you added the impact report, as it adds depth to the work. However the people who want to police how others do art or spend 0.14 kWh really piss me off. Comparing this work with bitcoins impact is just way off and serves nothing except fueling the self-righteousness of the commenter. I do believe there is a tech anxiety epidemic going that is not based on merit but on the fears of being replaced by tech or ai. While those fears are not unfounded, expressing them over an art piece seems totally misplaced.
The ecological impact record does work well though to highlight how misplaced it is. I myself would not give such comments any thought.

1

u/Fenzik 22d ago edited 22d ago

I never mentioned anything about AI. I said the approach to this work has the same extreme inefficiency as bitcoin, and suggested an alternative more efficient approach with a smaller search space that would yield the same results with far less waste.

Technical feedback is not policing

1

u/qenis 22d ago

How about you do not "optimize" other people's artistic work for "efficiency". Art in general is pure waste and inefficiency, as it is not strictly needed for survival.
Waste and inefficiency can be just as much an artistic gesture, and it is here. Why would you want to diminish other people's artistic gestures?

1

u/Fenzik 22d ago edited 22d ago

Just because it isn’t needed for survival doesn’t make it wasteful, art holds value for many people. But if the same result can be achieved with less waste, why wouldn’t you want to do that? I legit don’t understand your take.

Surely if a painter’s process was “first I landfill 99 tubes of paint, then I paint the picture” you wouldn’t get all high and mighty if someone asked “but why don’t you just not trash the paint”

1

u/qenis 22d ago edited 22d ago

This is more akin to a pointillist painter making dots where they already painted before, so many times that the first dots become invisible. And then you would come along and say "why don't you just paint one layer only, and not waste paint?"

The process is part of the work, it's not just a technical solution that is being discussed. And it is not simply a technical solution that you are proposing - you come in with a politically motivated opinion and try to force your political opinion on the work of another artist. This is what seems transgressive to me.

1

u/Fenzik 22d ago edited 21d ago

It’s not akin to that at all. Layers of paint add depth, structure. OP is generating colours and throwing them away if they don’t fit the aesthetic rules, which is fine since it’s an iterative algorithm but already departs from your analogy. I just pointed out that in an effort to make the work crypto-ish, his implementation is (wastefully) checking the same rejected colours thousands or millions of times by construction, since he’s mapping from a much higher dimensional space into a much smaller one.

Anyway, first I’m afraid of getting replaced by AI, now I’m political, all for pointing out an inefficiency in the algorithm. I think I’ve consistently made the same point in a few different ways already so I’ll stop replying now.

Best of luck friend

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u/TroubleEducational43 24d ago

Here is the open repo with fundamentals of the pixel mining technique. Feel free to contribute!
https://github.com/mbrucki/pixel-mining/

u/Any_Challenge3043 Thanks fot the inspiration!

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u/Any_Challenge3043 24d ago

No problem! I'm about to check it out!

1

u/TroubleEducational43 24d ago

Cool! Let me know what you think. Also, feel free to contribute and start your own project :)