Sort of similarly (sorry I don’t have a link handy but could find one tomorrow if anyone is interested), there was an interesting program someone posted in an AskHN post a year or two ago where the program took an input image, started with a blank circle that was made up of a configurable number of “pins” evenly spaced apart around the perimeter, and then starting from one “pin” iteratively found the next pin that, when connected with a line from the current pin, most made the generating image look more like the input image compared to the other possible lines, and then onto the next pin and the next until you had an image that roughly looked like the input image. The point of that original program was to figure out the best way to connect pins inserted around a circular frame with a single long thread and then weave the image with it. The original post had pictures in it of the guy’s finished artwork and everything.
I don’t remember what language he wrote it in, but I converted it to a react app that handled everything client side using html canvas and bitmap images. Not to publish or anything, just for fun.