What happens when you take one of the world’s best cartoon strips and remix it with some random process maths? Wonderful gibberish is what.
Josh Millard has used a Markov chain process to remix Calvin and Hobbes strips into a glorious mess. Markov chains are a random mathematical system where the next step depends only what state a system’s currently in and not on what went before it. Using that kind of system, Millard has taken a series of strips with blanked-out dialogue, then used dialogue stripped from two years-worth of cartoons — including 1268 lines from Calvin alone — to create new strips.
You can read exactly how it’s done here. Or just click through a series of wonderfully surreal strips here. It’s not the first time Millard has done something like this, though — if you like Garfield, you might also appreciate his Garkov project too.