

Show HN: Beauty Contest for Virtual Life - Digital Art Project (lurepet.com) - SergeyHack

Hi, looking for your feedback on my first public project.<p>The Idea:<p>Every lurepet (big picture) that you see on the site has some "genes" and is drawn according to them.<p>After the best lurepets are selected they can be bred to make children looking like their parents. This is going to be repeated to create more and more beautiful lurepets.<p>And of course the reason to vote is to save the future humanity that is attacked by evil robots which has the only flaw - insane obsession with lurepets :)<p>Implementation:<p>The drawing logic which is 99% of all the logic, is written in Clojure. I'm very glad that I chose it, because I can not imagine beeing so productive in developing and maintaining (!) complex domain logic in a more verbose language like Java.<p>The web part currently is a set of static files: html, js and images. Cloudflare is used to CDN the static except the index.html. I hope that will help if there is a massive spike in traffic. The votes are processed from nginx logs in offline mode.<p>The development took about a year. Hope you will like the lurepet drawings and help to select the best genes.
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zeratul
I like the idea of generating an image and selling it as a t-shirt but you
have to do better than this.

Website design is not very appealing. Have a look what other people do:
<http://dribbble.com/>

Your LurePets are not a new idea. Zazzle is selling them already:
<http://www.zazzle.com/lurepets+gifts> . Personally I like fractal t-shirts
more: <http://www.zazzle.com/fractal+tshirts>

But don't give up. It's a good idea that needs better front-end and more
advanced math and pattern generation at the back-end. If you auto-generate
images that no one else has and are appealing then you might have a
sustainable business.

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SergeyHack
Actually, Zazzle ones are mine :) But I see that it's not clear enough.

Thanks for the feedback.

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zeratul
That's great news. Keep doing it. I was thinking about using finite state
machines to generate eye-catching structures. I'm guessing that you are using
genetic algorithms to create populations of lurepets and improve them using
users' input.

You could build a google app engine web app to do that. Users that will train
your genetic algorithms will get discount for their t-shirts. You would use
google "in-app" purchases API to sell your t-shirts. If you get enough data
from users you can try to personalize, e.g. association rules, if someone
bought t-shirt A then he is likely to by t-shirt B.

Note to self: web app that uses genetic algorithms to improve its product and
association rules to sell more is also a data mining web app.

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po
The idea reminds me of electric sheep:

<http://electricsheep.org/>

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deutronium
It think this is a really cool idea. I just think the design need a bit of
work, especially the 'thumbs up' thumbnails.

Do you use any libraries for the genetic algorithm or was that all custom
code?

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SergeyHack
It's all custom code.

The fitness function is the human's taste for beauty which cannot be
formalized in a direct way. As I suppose genetic libraries are only solving
the cases when the fitness function can be expressed formally.

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iradik
Couldn't you periodically poll the Clojure runtime for votes instead of
processing logs? I thought Clojure made stuff like reporting easy. Just
curious as someone new (1 day in) to Clojure.

~~~
SergeyHack
Yes, I could. I just overestimated the load a lot. That is why I went that
"static" route.

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iradik
This is pretty interesting. How many original lurepets were there initially,
and how many are there now? Do they die?

~~~
SergeyHack
About 20000.

Currently on the site there are less than 100.

No, they did not die. They are still sleeping on my hard drive :)

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techietim
Clickable: <http://lurepet.com>

