The “math is scary” sentiment seems to run a little too strongly sometimes, especially considering that playing with the numbers can often give a deeper understanding of pattern construction. But then, I like knitting as brain exercise as well as relaxation which I know isn’t how everyone approaches it.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this. I’m excited to see how it could be adopted and used for everybody’s benefit.

Al (6), it’s not just the uniform terminology. This could make proofreading easier and reduce the incidence of errors in instructions. (I speak as one who found a large typo in A Gathering of Lace the hard way.)

MHotel (7), knitting has been crossbreeding with computers for a long time now.

JamesMason (8): no, it’s not. And knitters’ mailing lists and newsgroups were having copyright arguments before the Web was invented.

Dillo (9), “representable” is more like it.

Doranchak (10), my further reading was stopped by a password. How did the genetically-generated patterns look? Any good ones?

UNRAVL: Picks a weak link in the knit and unravels the whole mess from that point!

TWINEBALL: Similar to UNRAVL, but sends the unraveled yarn to another knitter, where it’s used to make what the h@kk3r wants!

MOTH: Simply eats holes in the knit until it falls apart.

…Which leads us to the competition between WOOLITE and MOTHBALL for antiviral/antitrojan supremacy!!!

For once, I am a luddite.

http://www.knitting-and.com/knitting/tips/automaton.htm

Some of the coolest stich patterns I’ve come up with are due to this technique.

for reals?

That kind of sounds like some form of DRM to me…

If so, wouldn’t this be rather forbidden on “the Boing Boing”?

Jim

In response to Al’s post (6), the point of developing KnitML is not to create an alternative to reading knitting patterns for humans. Rather, it would serve both as a way to express a knitting pattern as an algorithm that a computer can understand as well as provide an interchange format for software communication.

If you prefer to read charts but a pattern only provides written instructions, you have to manually get out the graph paper (or spreadsheet with fancy fonts) and chart it yourself. If, on the other hand, you have the KnitML for the pattern, you can use your rendering software with the “always chart when possible” option set to transform the pattern into a chart.

And if you prefer to do your math by hand, by all means don’t use software that would provide a transformation. The point is that there are plenty of knitters out there that do not like math that, given the chance, would prefer a piece of software to do it for them.

Okay, great, after all is said and done and committees have met, conferences are held, telephone -book-sized specs are shipped and MOUs signed, what we get from this is….Provable Knitting?

Here is the citation:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1274010

“In this paper we study the generation of lace knitting stitch patterns by using genetic programming. We devise a genetic representation of knitting charts that accurately reflects their usage for hand knitting the pattern. We apply a basic evolutionary algorithm for generating the patterns, where the key of success is evaluation. We propose automatic evaluation of the patterns, without interaction with the user. We present some patterns generated by the method and then discuss further possibilities for bringing automatic evaluation closer to human evaluation.”