Any Mac software that projects random points?

An app like that cant be very hard to make. Unfortunatly, I'm not a programmer. It all depends on exactly or inexactly how random they need to be. Might want to check out #macdev on irc.freenode.net. Good luck!

 

Seems to me that you could use a macro in Excel to do this... you could import the picture into a worksheet, size the cells so they're squares, and then run a macro that shades 50 randomly-selected cells within the range of cells that covers the picture.

 

Soooo.... you want a program that takes a photo as input and basically changes 50 random pixels to bright pink or something?

What format are the images in? How big are they? Can it just be any 50 random pixels?

 

Any chance of posting or linking to a sample image? I'd be happy to play around with one. The "random dots" bit is easy enough, once the photo is loaded. If I end up doing it in Java, it'll run on the PCs as well.

 

Please - any programmer worth their salt would make it customizable. Same with dot size and color, at least.

 

I thought 'total' randomness was a hard thing to achieve with a computer and even harder to measure...

How will you know when you get it right?
By doing some kind of distribution graphs with millions of measurements?

Just curious...

 

I'm going to use the word rank of any English words in the latest posts by mymemory as seeds for the random number generator. As close to utterly random as modern science can hope to get.

 

Ha-ha!

Topical, too...

 

Any chance of still getting sample images, just in case?

 

As long as this remains OK with parrothead, people can get the samples from me:



and




Both are ~2 MB (click on thumbnails to get hi-res versions). The images are not to be used commercially or redistributed, and so on.

 

Got one done...

It is just a plugin to ImageJ but should work well. You can eMail me using the user name "wdouglas2", then that little "@" sign, then the domain "myrealbox.com".

The plugin will likely have to be customized. For example, you should be able to select the colour and possibly the number of points. But even so, it is currently working with hard coded values.

William

 

Sounds like a neat project; I could see why you might not want to switch programs though. Even if your boss only meant it in a sense of convenience, switching between two programs alters the workflow and process and you can't be sure you're not introducing noise into the results. You seem pretty keen on having absolutely random samples, which someone else has stated is hard to do with computers. Even if the programs you use now were biased in their random number generators, you'd want to keep that same bias consistent across all the results...

 

Hrmmm... I wouldn't think it'd be a hugely difficult task to write an app to do this. I wrote (a few years back) a program that took a 16 shades of gray TIFF image and write to a text file each pixel with a hex value 0-F representing how dark the pixel was thus recreating the image in an ASCII art sort of format. It wouldn't have been terribly hard to random turn pixels (or an area of pixels) a certain color at random.

Why'd I write it? I dunno.

I have thought about random numbers a bit and I thought a fun way to do it (although I'm sure somebody will argue, "That's not random at all!") would be to use an audio CD. Basically the program would randomly (via your standard rand time seeded function) pick a track, find out how many seconds long it was, pick a random time in the track, and then use the data for that second of audio to generate a random number somehow. It's just as random as pulling a random seeded from time I guess but it would seem more fun to require the user to insert an audio-CD to run your program.

Of course... you could also contact the CDDB or whatever when the CD was inserted and reject music you don't like...

Heh... I've also contemplated writing a CD playing app that would reject users audio-cds based on my own preference...

Anyhow I'm getting off topic with my ridiculous programs.

 

Since the photos themselves are, in essence, of a random location, I'm not sure how important "true" randomness is, as opposed to simply ensuring a relatively even distribution of points. I'm not even sure why you couldn't use exactly the same points on every picture.

 

But they're not random locations. There must have been some intent on the photographers' part...

And an even distribution wouldn't be random, would it? Occasionally, you'd get some clumpiness... wouldn't you?

I have no clue what I'm talking about though, just blabbing...
Think Keith & the JD are getting to me...

 

There was a Tom Clancy where they used an audio CD recorded with random noise generated from the atmosphere to create an encryption key. You want to read the message? Insert the CD... Want to hide the message? Insert the CD...

They would destroy the CDs after each use, but that was because they didn't want anyone else to read their messages. You could use the same CD many times.

iWould assume this is the audio track on the CD:
It would be a recording of a microphone just sitting there, and then the gain would be upped the gain on it so those random popping, hissing, etc. noises were clearly audible.
Insert that into computer
Take random place on the CD, read 50 seconds from it, and then use each one of those second clippings of sound to generate a really big number. Voila! Random.
Or just use a dial up modem and then pick up the phone... that is pretty random too....