Constrained evolutionary art: Interactive flag design

The field of evolutionary art is generally concerned with evolving patterns that have little constraint. This paper describes an evolutionary art system that is constrained to form flag designs, following a set of common design patterns. The resulting genotype representation, genetic operators and forms of user interaction are chosen to allow an exploration of ldquoflag spacerdquo, as well as allowing the user to rapidly focus on aspects of specific designs. The utility of the approach is demonstrated by evolving flag designs using image similarity and by user-directed evolution.