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Posted by jihadjihad 4/2/2025

Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)(www.dorithegiant.com)
662 points | 108 commentspage 3
gcanyon 4/3/2025|
It bugs me than e.g. the owl's ears benefit from a dramatic change in color that isn't related to anything outlined by the circles.
tzury 4/2/2025||
2016…

This type of content is becoming rarer on the internet nowadays.

KiranRao0 4/2/2025|
I don’t think less of this type of content exists. Its just harder to find when inundated with all other slop on the internet.
ryandrake 4/2/2025|||
Just doing a Google search for "animals made from circles", you get the usual header full of "Images" and "Videos" crap, then in the actual results links, you have the usual Pinterest linkslop, Facebook linkslop, Reddit linkslop, a bunch of articles written by the designer (now we're getting somewhere). OP's link is finally on page 4 of the search results.
dwringer 4/2/2025||
For me, searching "animals made from circles", your comment put this HN thread as the #1 result while the #2 result was a syndicated article about the linked post. When I get more specific and search "animals drawn only from circles" it turns up the linked post as the first result. But my results may be more specific partly because I don't use ad blockers.
netghost 4/2/2025|||
Or we just don't look past twitter and such.
barbazoo 4/2/2025||
Could this be the next captcha challenge? "Draw an animal out of 13 circles to prove you are human".
CamperBob2 4/2/2025|
I was thinking that this would be low-hanging fruit for a model. The parameter space is so tiny compared to what a diffusion model already has to deal with...
KolibriFly 4/3/2025||
Reminds me of how some of the best ideas come out of working within restrictions, not in spite of them
deadbabe 4/2/2025||
Could an AI generate art like this and actually utilize perfect circles, to create whatever you ask?
noduerme 4/3/2025||
This page feels like an AI traveled back in time and (faked) the date.

[edit] Nevermind. I'm being too harsh. The creator was obviously having fun and being creative. That's cool. I think if nothing else this just proves how jaded and skeptical about clever artwork I've become in the past few years.

kleiba 4/3/2025||
Not circles, but arcs.
hmwhy 4/3/2025|
If you pay closer attention, you can see that some of the designs rely on very deliberate placements of circles; for example, eyes of the monkey and owl, and the nose of the whale.

Those are just the obvious ones that I can immediately spot — there was probably a lot of careful consideration into the placement of circles in order to facilitate good looking arcs and circles that bring the animals to "life".

kleiba 4/3/2025||
Sure, you're not wrong. But a circle is just an arc of length 2pi * radius.
curiousObject 4/2/2025||
Interesting.

What animals cannot be accurately depicted with 13 circles?

bsza 4/2/2025||
You can depict any animal swallowed by a pufferfish with 1 circle.
jessekv 4/2/2025||
What is essential is invisible to the eye.
trieloff 4/2/2025|||
Pelican on a bicycle
addaon 4/2/2025||
More generally, any animal that cannot be drawn in 12 circles cannot be drawn in 13 circles when riding a bicycle. By recursion, no animal can be drawn when riding a stack of seven bicycles.
nonethewiser 4/2/2025|||
minecraft sheep
Y_Y 4/3/2025|||
Corals?
mixedbit 4/2/2025|||
centipede
curiousObject 4/2/2025|||
I think so. With 13 circles, I can’t figure out how you could represent more than 26 legs (and other features would be lost).
InitialLastName 4/2/2025||
You can use perspective tricks to only show half the legs

A mature house centipede has 15 pairs of legs. You can probably get the point across with a portion of that, and use two parts of a circle for 2 legs.

globnomulous 4/3/2025|||
I was going to suggest "octopus" but your answer is better.
dylan604 4/2/2025||
An owl?
ccozan 4/2/2025||
Could be this https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/67ed7147fc708191be5b81ed4e...

But not that artsy as the OG.

dylan604 4/2/2025||
It was much less of an actual example as it was a reference to the draw the rest of the owl meme
ksajh 4/2/2025|
class Animal {

Circle circles_[13];

}

gnramires 4/2/2025||
You also need to encode the painted areas somehow. They are not only intersections on K shapes, but sometimes exclusions as well (like (A^B)/C). Two ways come to mind:

(1) Listing closed curves by vertices. Each vertex of a painted area is an intersection of two or more circles, and delimits a section of a circle. So the section of circles that enclose a circle can be encoded each by the union of:

(1.1) A circle (index); (1.2) A 2nd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a first point; (1.3) A bit identifying the (first) intersection (because there may be 2 possible); (1.4) A 3rd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a second point; (1.5) A bit identifying the (second) intersection.

Note the base circle would be the first intersection of a subsequent section of this closed curve, and the 3rd circle would be the subsequent base circle. So 1/2/3 won't be necessary for subsequent curves. So only (K+2) indices + (K+1) bits are necessary for this encoding.

Total ~K log2(K)+K bits. I hypothesize (left to the reader :)) a closed curve should contain at most 2x13 points. There can be at most 2^13 distinct regions however, so each figure (Animal) can be encoded with less than that many curves per figure. So each figure (Animal) can be encoded with less than 2^13 x 26x(5+1) bits =~ 1.3Mbit.

But that's mostly pathological cases, if each Animal must be a fully connected area, then that might reduce (hypothesis above) to at most only 26x(5+1) bits = 156 bits, or 20 bytes!

I left out a problem which area shapes encoded within each other (like eyes). In that case you need at most another 156 bits per inner cutout shape.

(2) Alternatively, you could use boolean operations to encode each shape. Also left as a fun problem :)

mondobe 4/2/2025||

  interface Animal {
    Circle[13] circles();

    // Leftover from Intro to CS, remember to remove
    void make_sound();
  }
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