Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)

See also work from Schmidhuber in the mid/late 1990s https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoart/node12.html

I thought this was a joke, but he actually did do this first. Impressive!

I'm not sure whether or not he did this first, but it's very similar to an extremely impressive, but old and well-known illustration of the power of Fourier analysis in which you construct a "Fourier epicycle" (think: machine made of circular gears of different ratios) that can sketch any image. 3blue1brown has a great video on Fourier Epicycles but you can also get the idea here https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/171755/how-c...

Or check out drawing Homer Simpson with the same technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw

wow, that's beautiful - the whole site https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ is an amazing rabbit hole im gonna lose myself in.

The red button is an absolute delight, be sure not to press it.

Also of potential interest is Kempe's Universailty Theroem which states you can draw any (polynomial) shape with a set of mechanical linkages. Like one that will sign your name.

https://academic.oup.com/plms/article/s1-7/1/213/1570315?log...

http://www.koutschan.de/data/link/

He was done a great deal of injustice when he was passed over for the Turing award that was given to Hinton, Bengio, LeCun.

Then there is this from his blog --

Dec 2024: Sadly, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 for Hopfield & Hinton is a Nobel Prize for plagiarism. They republished methodologies developed in Ukraine and Japan by Ivakhnenko and Amari in the 1960s & 1970s, as well as other techniques, without citing the original papers. Even in later surveys, they didn't credit the original inventors (thus turning what may have been unintentional plagiarism into a deliberate form). None of the important algorithms for modern Artificial Intelligence were created by Hopfield & Hinton. Details in the recent technical report, with lots of references, links, and facts.

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/physics-nobel-2024-plagiari...

Agree.

Also, AlphaFold is great but hardly an innovation. David Baker deserved it 100%.

damn, I got nerdsniped again