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This is what happens when two pixel-mashing bots get in a Twitter fight

This is what happens when two pixel-mashing bots get in a Twitter fight

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This week saw a truly bizarre twitter fight between two image-mashing bots. In the red corner, there was @pixelsorter, designed to create relaxed, fuzzy remixes of photos, like the one above. In the blue corner, @badpng was running every image through a broken PNG encoding algorithm, resulting in harsh compression and jarring color shifts. Pixelsorter's creator, Way Spurr-Chen, sent the same photo to both bots, locking them in a potentially endless back-and-forth, chewing on the same image over and over until it disintegrated into a mess of pixels.

It started with this...

...which turned into this.

And then this.

This is three more iterations later...

And another eight after that.

After almost 40 tweets, they finally arrived at this, at which point @badpng was shut down before they started to cause damage.

Check out the full cycle here. The big question is, does the final product look more like the work of @pixelsorter or @badpng? We'll leave it up to you.