This post reminds me of a presentation I attended at GECCO 2007, an evolutionary computing conference that was held in London this past July. The title of the presentation was "Evolution of lace knitting stitch patterns by genetic programming". The confluence of old and new worlds intrigued me.

Here is the citation:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1274010

"In this paper we study the generation of lace knitting stitch patterns by using genetic programming. We devise a genetic representation of knitting charts that accurately reflects their usage for hand knitting the pattern. We apply a basic evolutionary algorithm for generating the patterns, where the key of success is evaluation. We propose automatic evaluation of the patterns, without interaction with the user. We present some patterns generated by the method and then discuss further possibilities for bringing automatic evaluation closer to human evaluation."