alt Hacker News>Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details.
Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.
Replies
I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye. Of course, everything has quarks and leptons in infinitely complex patterning.
Yeah, "shockingly" the LLM summary has it wrong. The paper is really focusing on luminance contrast: the variation in contrast within a natural object tends to be narrower than the variation between objects, and the neural metabolism of our visual system tends to be optimized towards a natural range of contrasts. Modern high-contrast decor and lighting is way out of natural balance, and for some people it can be exhausting.
"Visual complexity" is just wrong: simple black / hot pink stripes are visually exhausting upon immediate perception, whereas the monochromatically brown detail of a tree trunk is only visually exhausting on close inspection.
God, what a useless website. I hate LLMs. The actual paper is here: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34
Natural patterns are often fractal.