Back in 2015, several months before releasing Expand I returned back to working a regular day job. As I’d previously been teaching at university this return meant that I was now programming full time for someone else, something I hadn’t done before. One of the downsides with programming jobs is that after work you feel less inclined to work on your own personal programming projects. This is a good thing. After sitting inside all day, it’s probably a good idea to get out and do something else.<\/p>\n
Even so I feel inclined to still make stuff so I started playing around with Twitter bots. I started by making the Who’s That Poke’mon bot<\/a> based on the Poke’mon TV show. Then I made three bots that would take a daily quote and display it in ASL<\/a>, Auslan<\/a> and Braille<\/a>. One night I made a small bot called Powerball Bot<\/a> that would randomly pick lottery numbers before the US lotteries. It’s kind of amusing to think that it’ll eventually pick a winning set of numbers.<\/p>\n
Recently I made a new bot called How Bots See Art<\/a>. It takes images of pieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and describes them using Microsoft’s Computer Vision services. It’s produced some amusing results.<\/p>\n
\nU-shaped vase<\/p>\n
A bottle of beer pic.twitter.com\/N0NJkqYDBt<\/a><\/p>\n
— How Bots See Art (@HowBotsSeeArt) March 4, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nFlight Into Egypt<\/p>\n
An old building with graffiti on the wall pic.twitter.com\/aanOivtduk<\/a><\/p>\n
— How Bots See Art (@HowBotsSeeArt) February 27, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’ll probably continue to make a few more bots in the future. I really love how for such a small amount of work they can produce rather neat results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"