I had this icon of a firefighter for ICM because I feel that debugging codes is like putting out fires.

Write a blog post about how computation applies to your interests, due 24 hours before the next class. This could be a subject you've studied, a job you've worked, a personal hobby, or a cause you care about. What projects do you imagine making this term? What projects do you love? (You can review and contribute to the ICM Inspiration Wiki page).

Over the past years of study, I have always learned computation very academically, and I have few friends who pursued coding as their career. Influenced by them, I found that computation can be artistic not only because it can make things happen, but I am also attracted by the beauty of computation itself. Some logics and concepts that are experienced in computation could be applied to immersive experiences in the real world.

I used to work on a Java project called the 24-point calculator. The 24-point game is a poker card game where you get four random cards and use various calculations including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to reach a total of 24. In my project, you input numbers from four poker cards, and it calculates all the ways you can achieve a 24 if there is a solution. It was not hard to complete, but really hard to figure out the most efficient way.

I have a lot of abstract ideas, I want to make some of them tangible at least through deigital media. Especially for those with a larger scale or ones that needs lots of repetition, I need to have some computational skills. One of the ideas is about how AI is putting fragments of what originally existing together, and it would be impossible for some human expression to done in that sense. To express that, it could be a visual animation where the faces of each passerby are pieced together from their eyes, noses, and mouths, forming a composite face. Each individual's voice forms nonsensical sentences. Elements of everyone's emotions are extracted, such as a smiling mouth corner or a furrowed brow, to illustrate the limitations of AI-generated content, as this combination does not represent any specific person or emotion.

In the same post (or a new one), document the process of creating your sketch. What pitfalls did you run into? What could you not figure out how to do? How was the experience of using the web editor? Did you post any issues to github?

I started with the simple sketch of face and eyes. Soon I found that I have no idea which RGB color to use for the color of skin so I asked chatGPT for help on that, and also on the matching color of my eyebrows, my body and my hair.

Everything wasn’t so hard until I get to drawing the hair. I tried to build it piece by piece using triangles, but it didn’t look good, and I got lost on remembering the coordinates of each points. I then tried arcs. I struggled a bit on the arc() function, especially when I rotate once I have to rotate back to get back to default position.