I like the idea of generating an image and selling it as a t-shirt but you have to do better than this.

Website design is not very appealing. Have a look what other people do: http://dribbble.com/

Your LurePets are not a new idea. Zazzle is selling them already: http://www.zazzle.com/lurepets+gifts . Personally I like fractal t-shirts more: http://www.zazzle.com/fractal+tshirts

But don't give up. It's a good idea that needs better front-end and more advanced math and pattern generation at the back-end. If you auto-generate images that no one else has and are appealing then you might have a sustainable business.

Actually, Zazzle ones are mine :) But I see that it's not clear enough.

Thanks for the feedback.

That's great news. Keep doing it. I was thinking about using finite state machines to generate eye-catching structures. I'm guessing that you are using genetic algorithms to create populations of lurepets and improve them using users' input.

You could build a google app engine web app to do that. Users that will train your genetic algorithms will get discount for their t-shirts. You would use google "in-app" purchases API to sell your t-shirts. If you get enough data from users you can try to personalize, e.g. association rules, if someone bought t-shirt A then he is likely to by t-shirt B.

Note to self: web app that uses genetic algorithms to improve its product and association rules to sell more is also a data mining web app.

The idea reminds me of electric sheep:

http://electricsheep.org/

Couldn't you periodically poll the Clojure runtime for votes instead of processing logs? I thought Clojure made stuff like reporting easy. Just curious as someone new (1 day in) to Clojure.

Yes, I could. I just overestimated the load a lot. That is why I went that "static" route.

It think this is a really cool idea. I just think the design need a bit of work, especially the 'thumbs up' thumbnails.

Do you use any libraries for the genetic algorithm or was that all custom code?

It's all custom code.

The fitness function is the human's taste for beauty which cannot be formalized in a direct way. As I suppose genetic libraries are only solving the cases when the fitness function can be expressed formally.

This is pretty interesting. How many original lurepets were there initially, and how many are there now? Do they die?

About 20000.

Currently on the site there are less than 100.

No, they did not die. They are still sleeping on my hard drive :)

Clickable: http://lurepet.com