letter-spirit-2-js

This is a JavaScript implementation of Letter Spirit 2, a computer model of human high-level perception and creativity, in the realm of letter-design. The model was invented by John Rehling, Gary McGraw, and Douglas Hofstadter.

You can try it out here.

Letter Spirit 2 is described in John Rehling's Ph.D. thesis., and in the book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.

I got interested in Letter Spirit, and the Hofstadter group's other projects, after reading the Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies book, but I couldn't find demos that were easy to get up and running. Hence this repo, and my related repos for Copycat and Letter Spirit Examiner.

My implementation is based entirely on Rehling's original Scheme code. The look of the UI is based on screenshots contained in McGraw's thesis, and on James Marshall's Metacat.

A caveat: It's hard to be sure that I've ported the Scheme code correctly (not least because the algorithm is stochastic). My implementation generates sensible-looking results, and I wrote a lot of unit tests for its various parts, but of course it's possible I may have got some things wrong. If you spot any problems, please submit an issue!

Here are some sample outputs produced by the app (with random seed = 123):