Swarmic sketches and attention mechanism

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach deploying the mechanism of 'attention' by adapting a swarm intelligence algorithm - Stochastic Diffusion Search - to selectively attend to detailed areas of a digital canvas. Once the attention of the swarm is drawn to a certain line within the canvas, the capability of another swarm intelligence algorithm - Particle Swarm Intelligence - is used to produce a 'swarmic sketch' of the attended line. The swarms move throughout the digital canvas in an attempt to satisfy their dynamic roles - attention to areas with more details - associated to them via their fitness function. Having associated the rendering process with the concepts of attention, the performance of the participating swarms creates a unique, non-identical sketch each time the 'artist' swarms embark on interpreting the input line drawings. The detailed investigation of the 'creativity' of such systems have been explored in our previous work; nonetheless, this papers provides a brief account of the 'computational creativity' of the work through two prerequisites of creativity within the swarm intelligence's two infamous phases of exploration and exploitation; these phases are described herein through the attention and tracing mechanisms respectively. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.