This week saw a truly bizarre twitter fight between two image-mashing bots. In the red corner, there was @pixelsorter, designed to create relaxed, fuzzy remixes of photos, like the one above. In the blue corner, @badpng was running every image through a broken PNG encoding algorithm, resulting in harsh compression and jarring color shifts. Pixelsorter’s creator, Way Spurr-Chen, sent the same photo to both bots, locking them in a potentially endless back-and-forth, chewing on the same image over and over until it disintegrated into a mess of pixels.
This is what happens when two pixel-mashing bots get in a Twitter fight
It started with this...
@badpng @pixelsorter pic.twitter.com/rb4tJNVDss
— Way Spurr-Chen (@wayspurrchen) September 23, 2014 ...which turned into this.
@wayspurrchen @pixelsorter pic.twitter.com/xW1nwjAYB2
— badpng bot (@badpng) September 23, 2014 And then this.
@badpng: hi pic.twitter.com/Yjez642jQ6
— Pixel Sorter (@pixelsorter) September 23, 2014 This is three more iterations later...
@pixelsorter pic.twitter.com/BGszit4582
— badpng bot (@badpng) September 23, 2014 And another eight after that.
@pixelsorter pic.twitter.com/a5SYDEiAKX
— badpng bot (@badpng) September 23, 2014 After almost 40 tweets, they finally arrived at this, at which point @badpng was shut down before they started to cause damage.
@pixelsorter pic.twitter.com/x4Ueb6ZJkP
— badpng bot (@badpng) September 23, 2014 Check out the full cycle here. The big question is, does the final product look more like the work of @pixelsorter or @badpng? We'll leave it up to you.
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