& More Awesomeness

I can't recall if I mentioned this before: while looking through the AI teacher's personal collection of AI journals, I ran across an article about the creation of an AI that could generate Chinese calligraphy. You give it a variety of examples of real Chinese calligraphy, it learns from those, and then by randomizing various parameters it's able to create novel calligraphy that is acceptable to expert Chinese calligraphers. Alternately, it can be used to create personalized handwriting fonts - you give it half a dozen characters in your own handwriting, then it generates the tens of thousands of other characters by mimicking your handwriting. There's one particularly impressive example where the AI generates the character "forever" (I think it's 永, but it's so artistic that it's hard to tell) that mimics a hand-drawn sketch of a horse.

The reason I bring this up now is that, while the article is controlled by the journals and sold for $20 a copy, I've discovered that a PDF of the article can be obtained for free on the site of an unspecified university in Hong Kong, which can be found with some looking on Google. The article is Automatic Generation of Artistic Chinese Calligraphy by Songhua Xu, Francis Lau, William Cheung, and Yunhe Pan.