Google Search for Connections

This is now my favorite piece of video on the web! And will remain so until something more intriguing comes along.

This fella Sebastian Schmieg, somewhere in the Netherlands, had the brilliant idea of giving Google Image Search a transparent image -- a truly blank nothing -- and asking the algorithm to find similar images. Google struggled with this at first, but then start drawing associations from the tiniest clues in the data -- and then took off from there. Schmieg repeated this 2,951 times -- each time asking for the most similar image to the previous one. And the chase is on!

It gets briefly NSFW at about one minute in. Yes, of course I noticed.

Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1 from kingcosmonaut3000 on Vimeo.

This is being shared all over the web now, quite naturally, and if you read the comments offered on pages where it's posted you see a lot of insightful observations. I'm interested in how many people have found the experience a spiritual one, seeing patterns that reveal much about the human mind and heart. I have to agree. For example, one of the transitions that surprised me is when the algorithm is looking for machine guns and then abruptly starts finding dandelions. Wow.