I reverse engineered a work of art, and this is what I learned

Abstract

This is the story of a weekend project which turned into a months long challenge. After coming across a photorealistic painting made entirely out of strings, I wanted to create one on my own. But how? I decided to reverse engineer the algorithm that computes which strings to stretch and in which order.

In this talk, I will show how I created a Python algorithm that produces a beautiful work of art. I will cover topics such as greedy algorithms, image processing, color spaces, performance optimization and many other challenges that I encountered while cracking the algorithm. And of course, I’ll show the resulting work of art!

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