Lineage

How the pictures grow

Each picture is a small network of functions: sines, bells, folds, and ramps wired together. Every point in the frame goes in as its position and distance from the centre, and comes out as a colour. Your browser turns each network into a shader of its own and runs it for every pixel.

A child is its parent with a few changes: a wire made stronger or weaker, a new wire, a new function spliced into a wire, or a function swapped for another. As the litter arrives, each child is drawn partway between its parent and itself, so you watch it change into what it is.

Some networks wire in a slow clock as well as position, and those pictures move. There is no goal and no score: what you pick is the only thing that decides where a line goes.

After Kenneth Stanley's compositional pattern-producing networks (2007) and the Picbreeder project that grew from them.