The Painting Fool Teaching Interface
Simon Colton
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK
www.thepaintingfool.com
The Painting Fool is software that we hope will be taken seriously as a cre-
ative painter in its own right { one day. As we are not trained artists, a valid
criticism is that we are not equipped to train the software. For this reason, we
have developed a teaching interface to The Painting Fool, which enables anyone {
including artists and designers { to train the software to generate and paint novel
scenes, according to a scheme they specify. In order to specify the nature and
rendering of the scene, users must give details on some, or all, of seven screens,
some of which employ AI techniques to make the specication process simpler.
The screens provide the following functionalities: (i) Images: enables the usage
of context free design grammars to generate images. (ii) Annotations: enables
the annotation of digital images, via the labelling of user-dened regions. (iii)
Segmentations: enables the user to specify the parameters for image segmenta-
tion schemes, whereby images are turned into paint regions. (iv) Items: enables
the user to hand-draw items for usage in the scenes, and to specify how each
exemplar item can be varied for the generation of alternatives. (v) Collections:
enables the user to specify a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) via the ma-
nipulation of rectangles. The CSP is abduced from the rectangle shapes, colours
and placements, and when solved (either by a constraint solver or evolutionary
process), generates new scenes of rectangles, satisfying the user constraints. (vi)
Scenes: enables the specication of layers of images, items, segmentations and
collections, in addition to substitution schemes. (v) Pictures: enables the spec-
ication of rendering schemes for the layers in scenes. In the demonstration, I
will describe the process of training the software via each of the seven screens.
I will use two running example picture schemes, namely the PresidENTS series
and the Fish Fingers series, exemplars of which are portrayed in gure 1.
Fig. 1. Exemplar pictures from the PresidENTS and the Fish Fingers series of pictures
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