Turing Test

Turing Test was born out of two things; my love for simulations and the need to build a suitably complex project to put Alba through its paces. The project explores "Turing patterns", a concept proposed by Alan Turing in 1952 as a means to describe how beautiful patterns arise in nature (e.g. leopard spots).

Turing Test makes extensive use of shaders which both compute the simulation and provide the visual rendering modes and effects. My first attempt at the project, built to run on the CPU was simple but had disastrously long rendering times. Learning to write GLSL for the project (under quite a lot of time pressure) was a strange mix of emotions, which only people who have written shaders before will understand 😅.

Keeping with the theme of the "Turing Test", my original plan was to use AI to co-create this project as much as possible. In fact, selecting Turing patterns as a subject was an idea originally prompted by GPT-4. However, as I progressed deeper into the project it was immediately clear that a lot of human input was needed. Not just on the artistic side, but also a lot of the programming work. It should be noted that GPT-4 was extremely helpful when creating some individual aspects of the shaders such as the distortion effects.

Editions of Turing Test will be given away free as a thank you to our early supporters and believers. We appreciate your excitement and trust in our platform, and hope to see you collect beautiful art from many other artists here in the future.

🙏 Credits and thanks

This project was put together in a relatively short amount of time (as most of the time was spent building the platform itself!). It would not have been possible without building on a lot of pre-existing work on reaction-diffusion algorithms from many others.

Specifically, the code took heavy inspiration (in technique and some helper functions from) Jason Webb's "Reaction Diffusion playground". As an engineer new to shaders, having this reference was invaluable, so thank you to Jason for open sourcing his work.

Secondly, the articles at Red Blob Games were incredibly helpful in wrapping my head around the theories behind the algorithm, as well as providing inspiration for some of the art.

🌎 Simulations: Hedge Maze | Organic Maze | Petri Dish | Aztec | Atomic | U-Skate | Coral | Negatons | Alan | Turing | Bubble | Xeno

🎨 Palettes: Black on White | White on Black | Hanabi | Sherbet | Neon Noise | I Love Hue Too | The Divide | Turtle Bay | Clay Court | Hot Lightning | Ethereal | Embers | Violet | Lava Lamp

🌱 Seed Modes: Random | CentreSquare | CentreCircle | AlbaA | AlbaL | AlbaB | Spiral | Grid | Fill | Cross | Sunburst | Sierpinski | Hexagons

Disclaimer

Editions of Turing Test are purely artistic and holds no value in the Alba ecosystem. There is no utility for holders. You should not mint an edition if you expect to sell the work for a profit.