It's a helluva verbose announcement, but the bottom line is: lotsa neat patterns to use in patchwork. Bookmark it to see what they come up with.
Exploring a Design Space for Patterns and Tilings
>
> a periodical programming competition involving Mathematics, Machine
> Learning and Visual Arts (student contributions are welcome)
>
>
> The goal of this periodical programming competition (with some
> price money) is the exploration of a special design space of
> patterning & tiling methods and to make selected points of this
> space (methods that generate interesting and aesthetic results)
> available for image editing so that contemporary and future
> artists, illustrators, comic artists, designers, ... can use
> them under an open source license (CC0 and the like).
>
> The design space relevant for image editing is based on the idea
> that patterns and tiles can be generated by basic shapes (prototiles)
> together with a CRMT command list approach that repeatedly clone,
> rotate and mirror a prototile and translate it over a finite pattern
> plane. With this unified approach the centuries of mathematical and
> artistic knowledge about patters, tilings and ornaments will be
> usable in image editing for bitmap and vector images. By programming
> CRMT-image interpreter as standalone programs or Plug-ins in bitmap
> graphic programs (GIMP, Photoshop, ...) and vector graphic programs
> (Illustrator, Inkscape) very powerful artistic tools can be made
> that will be using a growing number of CRMT command lists to generate
> all sorts of patterns from input images.
>
> The goal of the first competition is to reproduce known tilings
> from the Tiling Database
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This
> should be done by a learning process because such processes should
> be the basis for exploration the design space and its extensions
> in further iterations of the competition. Technically the learning
> of a CRMT command list for a tiling is viewed as a 2D packing problem
> with the 2-objective function "gap -> 0 & overlap -> 0".
>
> The competition is originated in the field of Evolutionary Art
> therefore the learning process should be preferably done with
> Evolutionary Computation (EC) methods like Genetic Programming
> but it is not restricted to this if the learning environment
> with all aspects and parameters are published under an open source
> license so that others can use it for further exploration.
>
> A detailed description of this programming competition with more
> technical details, winning conditions, price money, and future
> directions can be found under:
>
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>
> Registration starts on 01.05.2015 and ends on 15.11.2016.
> Contributions can be made until 15.01.2016.
>
> Comments and suggestions to all aspects of the competition project
> (guba at evo-art.org).
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- e m a i l : j a c k @ c a m p i n . m e . u k Jack Campin, 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland mobile 07800 739 557 Twitter: JackCampin