Genuary 2021 Day 21: "Function"

 

This one was a relatively simple implementation of the prompt, once I decided what the prompt meant to me. The literal prompt on the Genuary page says:

function f(x) { 

    DRAW(x); 

    f(1 * x / 4); 

    f(2 * x / 4); 

    f(3 * x / 4); 

}

Which is easy enough to read, if you're into code, but I wasn't just going to paste that into my code, it required a certain amount of interpretation - what is x? And if x is not a numeric thing, what does it mean to divide or multiply x by numbers?

So, I stepped back a bit and turned the pseudocode above into more human-friendly instructions:

1. At each step, you will start with a region of the page.
2. Draw something that fills that region
3. Then split the region into four sub-regions
4. For the first three of the four sub-regions, recurse to step 1

Which I think pretty well captures the feeling of the pseudocode, but affords a little more freedom, especially in how the region is split.

My drawing step is just to draw a (colored) rectangle that fills the region. When drawing using my AxiDraw, I just have a single black pen hooked up.

I inset the rectangle to keep edges from overlaying each other.

To split the rectangle, I randomly pick a half split, quarter split, and three-quarters split location along the long axis of the rectangle. I randomly choose whether to output children 1, 2, and 3 or 2, 3, and 4, which might be a stretch from the original code, but I consider it an orientation detail; 2, 3 and 4 is really just 1, 2, and 3 from the other side of the rectangle, so it's fine.

I think this looks a little like a couple server racks, mostly filled.

Or maybe a Rockwell Automation Retro Encabulator:

Tools Used: AxiDraw, Pentel 5mm pen

Languages Used: Python

Development Time: ~30 minutes

Drawing Time: ~5 minutes

What's Generative Here: Each box is subdivided randomly, and colored randomly.