An Interface for Fitness Function Design

Fitness assignment is one of the biggest challenges in evolutionary art. Interactive evolutionary computation approaches put a significant burden on the user, leading to human fatigue. On the other hand, autonomous evolutionary art systems usually fail to give the users the opportunity to express and convey their artistic goals and preferences. Our approach empowers the users by allowing them to express their intentions through the design of fitness functions. We present a novel responsive interface for designing fitness function in the scope of evolutionary ant paintings. Once the evolutionary runs are concluded, further control is given to the users by allowing them to specify the rendering details of selected pieces. The analysis of the experimental results highlights how fitness function design influences the outcomes of the evolutionary runs, conveying the intentions of the user and enabling the evolution of a wide variety of images.