The Deck of Queens

In The Magicians by Lev Grossman, Quentin discovers he has the ability to perform real magic:

"Now the room was absolutely still. Dean Fogg sat as if he were frozen in place. All the hairs were standing up on Quentin’s arms, but he knew what he was doing. His fingers left almost imperceptible phosphorescent trails behind them in the air. He definitely felt high. He leaned forward and blew lightly on the card house, and it collapsed back down into a neatly stacked deck. He turned the deck over and fanned it out on the table like a blackjack dealer. Every card was a Queen—all the standard suits, plus other suits that didn’t exist, in different colors, green and yellow and blue. The Queen of Horns, the Queen of Clocks, the Queen of Bees, the Queen of Books."

Something about this passage struck me. I have a theory that these each correspond to particular women that Quentin meets through the book.  "Some of them had Julia’s face. Some of them had the lovely paramedic’s." So Julia, Jane Chatwin, Alice and Janet, maybe, for the four suits that are named? Jane would be queen of clocks, there was a horn given by the river nymph, and bees for Brakebills, of course... I'm not sure if there is an exact match. But of course when I first read it, it seemed only evocative and mysterious.
There were a lot of magic things in the book I wished I could see in real life, but this one, at least, I could make a decent replica of.
I needed to start with a card template. I found several large images of cards in Google Images, but I wanted even higher resolution so I found this vector file:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vector-cards/

I removed the parts of the image I wanted to replace.

I had previously experimented with automatically downloading images from Google Images using Matlab and a search term. It wasn't hard to get a few hundred photographs including the faces of women this way. Matlab isn't the best tool for a lot of things, but I find I can do most things I want in it and it's just so much easier to not worry about compiling and the user interface and the command line. I really like always being able to inspect what variables are in memory. It has the ability to save and load data structures whole, which I've never found in another language. And it's easy to do image processing there. So anyway, I used it for this project.
I had one face detection method already installed in Matlab: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~xzhu/face/
 It was pretty slow-- about a minute per face-- but it worked really well at localizing the face. I cropped the face and resized it to fit onto the space on the card. You could probably make it faster if you played with the parameters a little.
I also had a few techniques available in Matlab for edge and contour detection in images. Since the faces on cards are line drawings, I would need to convert the photographs to line drawings. The results I liked best came from a technique I had come up with myself that involves subtracting a blurred version of the image from itself (to leave just the high-frequency information) and thresholding. If you've ever tried the old pencil-sketch action on Photoshop, it's a little like that.
To generate the symbols I thought of going to Google Images again and restricting it to black and white line art, but then I thought of a better idea: I would use Unicode symbols.
It turns out some of the best Unicode symbols require more than one byte to represent, which confuses Matlab, but one can work around it using the techniques described in the comments of this post: http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/couple-of-matlab-bugs-and-workarounds
I did need to go through and pick out areas of the Unicode space that had interesting images. As I was doing that I accidentally hacked into the Matrix:

After I had the Unicode characters and could render them in Matlab, I needed to place them in the right spots on the card. You may have never noticed, but the clothes on a face card contain decorative patterns based on the suit. So I decorated the clothes with tiny versions of the Unicode characters. The flower the queen is holding is also made up of these symbols, rotated.

Of course, I had to erase the original decorations on the clothing first. I also recolored the suit randomly for each image.

You might notice that the card is not exactly rotationally symmetric. That was originally a bug, but I kind of liked the effect so I left it in.

Here are some results. It can generate at least a few hundred cards before it runs out of Unicode pictures. Sometimes the face detection went wrong, so I just threw those cards away. There were more than 52 left over, anyway. This is just a few of them. You can click to see them larger.

I thought the project might be improved if one measured semantic similarity between the symbols and the faces and tried to match them up, but I didn't do that. It would also be nice to have different clothing styles, but it was too much work.

I printed them out and cut them out and gave them to Lev Grossman at a book signing in DC.

Here is the code to generate them, just so you can see what it looks like. I have terrible coding practices when I know I'm the only person who will ever look at it and I'm not going to reuse any of it. I even used a little high school trig when I put the symbols around the half-ring.

template=imread('queen.png');

chrs=[8225,9096,9650,9728:9742,9760:9775,9784:9839,9984,9985,9991:9994,9999,10010:10023,10025:10059,10164,10753,11035,11039,11043,11052,11622,43612,59092,59102,59111,59118,59119,59127,59132,61953,63024,63063,63744];

addpath('C:\matlab apps\edges (and piotr toolbox)');

addpath('C:\matlab apps\face-release1.0-basic');

addpath('C:\matlab apps');

imsdir='C:\Users\Doug\Downloads\pics\New folder\';

Aims = dir([imsdir '/*.jpg']);

for facecount=1:165

%these are interesting icons.

hold off;

cla;

%,61502,61513,61514,61516:61545,61547:61550,61557:61559,61562:61564,61593:61594,61604:61606,61609:61622];

ax = axes('XLim',[0 2.5],'YLim',[0 3.5]);

axis off;

set(gca,'xtick',[],'ytick',[]);

%mark out the borders of clothing

quadx = .4:.01:2.1;

quady=interp1([.24 .25 1 1.5 2.25 2.26],[0 1.75 2.5 2.5 1.75 0],quadx);

axis equal

%parts(61)=fillout([ .25 1 1.5 2.25 ],[1.75 2.5 2.5 1.75],[0 3 0 3],'w');

partcount=1;

%draw outline of card

parts(partcount)=rectangle('Position',[0,0,2.5,3.5],'Curvature',0.2,'LineWidth',2);

partcount=partcount+1;

hold on;

parts(partcount)=rectangle('Position',[0.3,0.3,1.9,2.9],'LineWidth',.5);

partcount=partcount+1;

%choose color

%draw symbols in corners of card and draw a Q in a random font

h = uicontrol('Style','text','String','My Font','FontName','MyFont');

list = listfonts(h);

parts(partcount)=text(0.15,3.1,'Q','fontname','Card Characters','fontsize',20,'fontUnits','normalized','HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(0.15,2.75, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',20,'fontUnits','normalized','HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(0.55,2.9, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',30,'fontUnits','normalized','HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

%use line detection and face detection to draw the face

I=imresize(imread([imsdir    '/' Aims(facecount).name]),[600 NaN]);

load('C:\matlab apps\face-release1.0-basic\face-release1.0-basic\multipie_independent.mat');

model.thresh = min(-0.65, model.thresh);

%bs = detect(I, model, model.thresh);

%if size(bs,2)==0

%    continue;

%end

%bs = clipboxes(I, bs);

%bs = nms_face(bs,0.3);

%posemap = [90:-15:15 0 0 0 0 0 0 -15:-15:-90];

%mina=min(bs(1).xy(:,1));minb=min(bs(1).xy(:,2));maxa=max(bs(1).xy(:,3));maxb=max(bs(1).xy(:,4));

%part=imcrop(I,[mina minb maxa-mina maxb-minb]);

% 

%     if size(part,3)==3

%         grayI=medfilt2(rgb2gray(part),[3 3]);

%     else  grayI=medfilt2(part,[3 3]);

%     end

%     H = fspecial('gaussian', 40, 25);

%     blurred=imfilter(grayI,H,'replicate');

%     pencilsketch = min((double(grayI))-double(blurred)+255,255);

%     rescaled=1-max(min((pencilsketch-200)*5,255),1)/255;

    %bwface{facecount}=rescaled<.2;

    hold on

   parts(partcount)=image([1.1 1.8], [3.2 2.5],bwface{facecount}*255,'AlphaData',bwface{facecount}<1);

   partcount=partcount+1;

colormap gray

%random arcs of symbol across clothing

hold on

image([2.2 .3], [.3 3.2],template,'AlphaData',rgb2gray(template)<255);  

parts(partcount)=text(1.12, 2.25, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',7,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.85 .82 .06],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(1.11, 2.10, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',6,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.85 .82 .06],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(1.11, 1.97, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',5,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.85 .82 .06],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(1.71, 2.25, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',9,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.85 .82 .06],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(1.51, 2.10, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',8,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.85 .82 .06],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(1.42, 1.97, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',7,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.85 .82 .06],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(1.90, 3.08, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',9,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[0 0 0],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(2.0, 2.92, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',7,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[0 0 0],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

partcount=partcount+1;

parts(partcount)=text(2.11, 2.75, char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',6,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[0 0 0],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

set(parts(partcount-2:partcount), 'rotation', -60);

partcount=partcount+1;

%draw collar

collarchar=char(chrs(randi(size(chrs,2))));

for collarx=1.03:.08:1.8;

    parts(partcount)=text(collarx, 2.429, collarchar, 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',9,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.95 .95 .95],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

    partcount=partcount+1;

end

% draw sleeve

sleevechar=char(chrs(randi(size(chrs,2))));

sleevex=.3200:.05:.8197;

sleevey=interp1([.3200 .8197],[1.64 2.045],sleevex);

for sleeveindex=1:size(sleevex,2)

   parts(partcount)=text(sleevex(sleeveindex), sleevey(sleeveindex), sleevechar, 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',9,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.95 .95 .95],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

    partcount=partcount+1;

end 

%draw ring

ringchar=char(chrs(randi(size(chrs,2))));

for ringtheta=-pi/4+.08:.2:3*pi/4+.08

   parts(partcount)=text(.66+.31*cos(ringtheta),1.75-.31*sin(ringtheta), ringchar, 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',9,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[.95 .95 .95],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

    partcount=partcount+1;

end 

for petal=1:6

    parts(partcount)=text(.60+.1*cos(petal*2*pi/6), 2.44+.1*sin(petal*2*pi/6), char(chrs(facecount)), 'fontname', 'code2000', 'fontsize',9,'fontUnits','normalized','Color',[0 0 0],'HorizontalAlignment','center','VerticalAlignment','middle');

    set(parts(partcount), 'rotation', petal*60+90);

    partcount=partcount+1;

end

%paste in hand and flower stem

%hand=imread('hand.png');

%parts(68)=image([.5 .875], [2.5 2.125],hand,'AlphaData',255-hand(:,:,1));

%place symbols around flower

set(findobj(gcf, 'type','axes'), 'Visible','off')

t1 = hgtransform('Parent',ax);

t2 = hgtransform('Parent',ax);

set(parts,'Parent',t1);

parts2=copyobj(parts,t2);

Txy = makehgtform('zrotate',pi,'translate',[-2.5 -3.5 0]);

 set(t2,'Matrix',Txy);

 set(parts2(3:5), 'rotation', 180); 

 axis off;

 saveas(h,['queen' num2str(facecount) '.png']);

end

A Poetry Machine

robot: anthropomorphic automaton
songbird: arboreal artist
storybook: amazing adventure
textbook: authoritative algebra
birdhouse: architectural aviary
chemistry: academic alchemy
tin: antique aluminum
bronze: archaeological alloy
neon: amber ambiance
divide: antagonistic arithmetic

These are what you might call "poetic paraphrases." They are all two word definitions-- an adjective followed by a noun-- where both words begin with the letter A. All of these were generated automatically, by a program I wrote. The program uses what's called a distributional semantic vector space to map English words into a numeric representation and then map that numeric representation to the closest poetic paraphrase.
I chose the constraint "starting with the letter A" because it was easy to get a list of adjectives and nouns starting with a particular letter, but it could be any constraint you want, as long as you can put together a list of results that meet that constraint: a particular meter or rhyme, for example.
The trick is all in representing a word by a list of numbers in such a way that similar words are nearby, and the average of two words carries some of the meaning of each of them. Someone else did that hard part for me. It's a program called word2vec, and you can download it for free if you want to play with it.
What I like about the program is that the paraphrases strike me as clever or witty. They remind me of the kennings in Beowulf. It would have taken me awhile to think of them, and I'm not sure mine would be as good. The connections the program makes are associative, the way memory works, rather than completely literal. "Antagonistic arithmetic" takes both meanings of the word "divide" and acts as if they were talking about the same thing. "Amber ambience" is an evocative phrase for the yellow glow we associate with a neon sign-- an overly literal interpretation wouldn't be able to call neon "amber" because it's actually helium in a glass tube that glows yellow. But because the system wasn't hand-programmed but uses statistical properties of enormous amounts of newspaper text to come up with its associations, what it knows about neon is all wrapped up in how we talk about neon. Tin isn't really a kind of aluminum, but we used to use tin foil and tin cans, and now we use aluminum foil and aluminum cans. Tin toys are almost always antique toys.
Like most computer generated art, there's a little bit of human interference in what you get exposed to. I generated definitions for three times as many words as you see above, and picked my favorites. I also generated ten definitions for each word, and picked my favorite from that list. So what you are seeing is my top ten choices from about 300 generated phrases. But I feel like that's just me being an editor. The computer is really the artist here.
Word2vec can also be used to come up with analogies, which can also sometimes be quite clever. Here's an online version you can play with if you want to try that out.
If you send me a few words, I'll generate a paraphrase for you (you might have to wait a few days.)