Creative Computing

Joel Gethin Lewis

Week 2: Lecture 4: Deciding

Group meditation.
Questions?
Deciding - logic in humans and computers.
Looping - doing things many times, but using logic to stop.
Moving from two spatial dimensions to three.
Some artists working in three dimensions.
Feedback.
Homework Assignment - exercises from Code as Creative Medium - Conditional Testing and Iteration as well as introduction to p5.js

Are you recording Joel? Have you taken the register first?

All questions allowed!
2 minutes alone on post it notes, then double group size every 1 minutes until it's the whole group.
This idea came from Zach Lieberman. He does this exercise at the start of every session of School of Poetic Computation in New York.

Boolean algebra, named after George Boole. The Boolean data type is a common to most programming languages - only two values - True (1) or False (0). One is true, nothing is false.
Boolean operators allow you to combine or invert boolean data types - the three basic ones are AND, OR and NOT.
Control flow in programming is how you control the flow of which part of the program is executed next.
Conditional statements, such as if statements are very common.

Going from a square to a cube.
The third dimension is usually described in terms of a new letter: z.
The direction and orientation of the three dimensions varies in a similar way to the way the direction of y varies in two dimensions between high school graphs and digital screen co-ordinates, so always check which way is what.
See how Pythagoras works in three dimensions in this Better Explained article.
Also see this Immersive linear algebra course - what is Linear Algebra?.

One way of storing three dimensional information is using point clouds.
The output of three dimensional scanners is often in point clouds - a grid of positions, each with a depth value - think of Pin Art toys from the 1980's.
Another way of storing three dimensional data is to use Voxels (from the initial letters of volume and element, with the insertion of -x- for ease of pronunciation).
Voxels can be a super efficient way of storing three dimension information - used for everything from MRI scanners to Minecraft.
Creative uses of points in space: Motorstudio Design Room / Hermès × Tokujin Yoshioka / Shining360 by Claire Hentschker.

Another way of storing three dimensional information is using a series of polygons.
Polygons are geometric objects with at least three straight lines and angles.
Polygons are plane figures - i.e. they are flat.
Some examples: squares, triangles and pentagons.
Triangles are often used in three dimensional software and games - for more information about why this is so see this Computerphile video about A Universe of Triangles.

Thanks!