Exploring Persian rug design using a computational evolutionary approach

Considering the art of Persian rug design as a computation creative design problem, with a vast domain space of possible design solutions that have aesthetic, cultural and historical considerations, we describe our dual stage genetic algorithm system for designing basic patterns of a specific type of Persian rugs. Our approach uses hard and soft design rules that we have been gleaned from the passed down traditions of "Shah Abbas" Persian rug design. We break down the rug generation into two phases. In the first phase, the rug (a collection of connected spirals as a core structure) is generated exploiting the available genetic operators. In the second phase, an evaluation mechanism based on the most basic soft design rules ranks each generated genotype and the highly ranked genotypes are presented to the user to select the most aesthetically acceptable rugs for the next evolution. We report on early results in this paper.