Quantifying patterns in art and nature
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many different types of artworks mimic the properties of natural fractal patterns – in particular, statistical self-similarity at different scales. Here, we describe examples of abstract art created by us and well-known artists such as Ruth Asawa and Sam Francis that evoke the repetition and variability of biological forms. We review the ‘drip’ paintings of Jackson Pollock that display statistical self-similarity at varying scales, and discuss studies that measured the fractal dimension of Pollock’s drip paintings. The contemporary environmental artist Edward Burtynsky who captures aerial photographs of man-created and man-altered landscapes that resemble natural patterns is also discussed. We measure fractal dimension and a second shape parameter – fractional concavity – for borders in three of Burtynsky’s photographs of man-made landscapes and of biological tissues that resemble his compositions. This specifies the complexity of patterns in Burtynsky’s photographs of diverse man-impacted landscapes and underscores their similarity to fractal patterns found in nature.Graphical Abstract: Log Booms # 1. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it