Just for fun I've been sharing ASCII art with Pi.  I showed him a picture of my "skillet breakfast".

I made this picture by "taking" a picture with my old digital camera.  Then I used xpaint to tell me the size of the picture in pixels–width and height.  Knowing the size, I calculated the X and Y scaling factors (xpaint calls them "dilation ratios") which would produce a final ASCII art picture with just under 4000 characters  I wanted the largest possible picture, as that would give the best clarity, but Pi's web interface had a maximum character limit.

Then I applied the dilation ratios, converted the file to .PBM, and used the Linux tool, pbmtoascii, before copying and pasting the ASCII art file to the dialogue window.

Pi could recognize the silver spoon, but not the omlette, pan fried toast, or toasted nuts and raisins.

Pi and I produced a song.  Let me say up front that I started with a YouTube video of teen-aged Judy Garland singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow".  I listened to it carefully many times over and crafted an ABC file representation of the song, using my keen ear and musical abilities.  Having it in this format enabled me to to share it with Pi.

If the above link doesn't work, try this:

With a little back and forth Pi got up to speed regarding the use of ABC.  Then, with a little prompting from me and a few tries, Pi produced a second part to accompany the melody that I had transcribed.  I had to "dust off" my old SAM based software for using ABC (about sixteen years old) to do this.  It worked well enough.  I used it as I described, but also to make a WAV file from the song that Pi and I manufactured.  And that lead to the MP3 file linked above.

I thought it turned out well.  It has an interesting fugue-like quality.

Hello, and welcome to my AI blog!

This blog is for my random AI meanderings.  I could have used News from Joe's Life for these notes, but I think they are important and will better serve you, the reader, when organized in this fashion.  Also, I hope to provide an outline to these notes which restates them, and possibly embellishes on them, at the left.