The best sites on the ‘Net

OUR MONTHLY ROUND-UP OF THE WEB’S MOST ILLUMINATING, USEFUL, OR JUST-PLAIN-COOL WEBSITES.

Style Attentional Network ONE OF THESE THINGS IS… ACTUALLY QUITE SIMILAR TO THE OTHERS. style.airi.kr/demo

This site is very easy to operate and produces some excellent results, but that simplicity is certainly superficial. The catchily-named Style Attentional Network is a page dedicated to demoing a concept of image synthesis that creates a completely new image out of two existing images. The nitty gritty of how this works is explored in a research paper by Dae Young Park and Kawn Hee Lee with Cornwell University, which is titled “Arbitrary Style Transfer with Style-Attentional Networks”, for those seeking further info. As for the web page, simply plug in a ‘content’ image that you want transformed, and then choose a second image to be used as a ‘style’ for the transformation. You will then be able to view and download a resulting image that will have much the same construction as the first, but use textural, stylistic or graphical cues from the ‘style’ image. There are samples to choose from that include some famous personalities and paintings (such as Starry Starry Night or The Great Wave Off Kanagawa) or you can simply upload your own photos, but images with a resolution above 512 x 512 are recommended.

Codex Atlanticus EXPLORE DA VINCI’S MUSINGS IN EPIC DETAIL. codex.atlanticus.it

For those familiar with Da Vinci, you’ll know that his work was extensive – painter, architect, inventor, mathematician and pretty much any intellectual title you could bestow upon a person. The Codex Atlanticus is the largest collection of original sketches, drawings and text by Leonardo that exists today, spanning some 1,119 double-sided pages, and while the real deal is currently preserved in Milan, this website offers an extensive and meticulous look into the great man’s work. For some, this may just be a curio to peruse in order to glance over some interesting pictures and notes, but for others this proves an excellent resource for reference and study. The website uses a nifty guide, colour-coding the five primary subject areas that Da Vinci covered – geometry and algebra, physics and natural sciences, tools and machines, architecture and applied arts, and human sciences. It also offers an efficient system of plotting the sequence the pages are found in the collection compared with the years in which they were written, or you can sort by the subject.

Talk to Transformer SEE THE LITERARY GENIUS OR STUPIDITY OF MACHINE LEARNING. talktotransformer.com

Here at TechLife, we do quite enjoy our machine learning websites. We appreciate them for their ability to tread the fine line between a majestic future of AI assistance and a hilarious attempt at mimicking humanity, and this particular website offers a real nice glimpse of both extremes. Copy or type in any length of text and have a machine learning algorithm complete your story. This could take the form of a blog post, news article, narrative, script or anything that the AI deems worthy of your words. The website has been built by machine learning engineer Adam King and offers a neat way to interact with an existing model developed by OpenAI. At this stage, we wouldn’t suggest using any of the generated words verbatim for… pretty much anything, as there are plenty of problems in consistency and tone. But seeing what the AI comes up with makes for a rather enjoyable, and occasionally spooky, pass-time, and for those seeking literary inspiration, we can see this as an exceptional device for cracking writer’s block.