Description:

Flowers, sunsets, temples, factories, grids, circuits, faces, shadows. What do you see?

Method:

BEHOLDER is an ode to entropy locking. A simple grid based system is used to draw "circles" and "rectangles" (hard to exactly call them that), using colors sampled from elsewhere in the grid, according to entropy-locked random rules. The size and shape of the grid, which colors and shapes to draw, and even how the colors will mutate, all is determined according to pure uniform random noise. The resulting emergent structure is a result of the entropy locking.

Since entropy locking is unpredictable, there is also a check that regenerates the image if the generated frame color is pure white. This usually happens because the entropy lock simply never locked (it's random), resulting in a pure white output. If this happens, a super dumb trick is used to regenerate the image deterministically using the same hash but a different "slice" of the rng.

BEHOLDER demonstrates the power of emergent behavior to create interesting patterns. With very limited code and rules, interesting visuals can be summoned from the void like magic. I setup BEHOLDER to mostly create "bright moments", little samples of shapes and colors that make me feel good to look at. Occasionally a stunningly clear shape or face arises, enjoy it if you see it, but know that others might not agree.

Controls:

s -> save a png of the output
n -> advance to the next frame... tap it over and over, see what happens, you'll get a feel for the algorithm