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

10 points by SergeyHack ↗ HN
Hi, looking for your feedback on my first public project.

The Idea:

Every lurepet (big picture) that you see on the site has some "genes" and is drawn according to them.

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.

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 :)

Implementation:

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.

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.

The development took about a year. Hope you will like the lurepet drawings and help to select the best genes.

11 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] thread
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 :)

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.
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.

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

Thanks for the feedback.

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.

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?

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.