Seeking meanings in meaningless is not just about analysing a fish typer but a daily practice shared by all.

https://blog.jpl.design/posts/world-in-box/infinite-goldfish/

Description

Infinite Goldfish is an installation in which a goldfish “types” an “infinitely” long string of letters by unconsciously swimming in an aquarium. Inspired by Infinite Monkey Theorem and Eternal Recurrence Theory, it intends to raise the question of whether meaning does exist by demonstrating an absurd practice of looking for meaning in randomness.

Through Raspberry Pi and Pi camera, a top view of the fish tank is taken and uploaded to a cloud drive for further process every minute. Using Blob Detection, the position of the fish in the aquarium is found and mapped to a specific English letter. The generated string is then passed to a piece of C code, which would create files marking out and counting the meaningful words that appeared in the text. Processing sketches real-time demonstrating the analysis would be shown on monitors beside the tank, and a projector will protect the real-time tracking result to the tank.

Classes

World in a Box: From the Aquarium to the Terrarium and Beyond