readings

Jul 6

“We are particularly sensitive to oneness and twoness; odd and even. Their massive difference, a doubling process, is the prime example of integer growth in out material universe. It is a numerical relationship that is instantly recognised by mankind and subordinate only to their origin: Genesis, The Act of Creation, from nothing to one.” Barratt, Krome. Logic and Design — in Art, Science & Mathematics. Guilford, Connecticut: Design Books, 1980. 1989.

“Pure machine authorship is impossible to imagine without an autonomy sufficient to pass the [Lovelace Test]. In a manner similar to that of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s famous chess-playing machine (often called “The Turk”), a purported automaton that convinced countless observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century of the possibility of machine autonomy (Sussman 1999; Standage 2002), there may always be a human, or at least significant human knowledge, hiding inside the “creative” machine. Halpern supports this view, noting that “machine intelligence is really in the past: when a machine does something ‘intelligent,’ it is because some extraordinarily brilliant person or persons, sometime in the past, found a way to preserve some fragment of intelligent action in the form of an artifact” (Halpern 2006, p. 54). Such a perspective is applicable to many less “intelligent” but musically useful generative music systems.” Ariza, Christopher. “The Interrogator as Critic: The Turing Test and the Evaluation of Generative Music Systems.” Computer Music Journal 33.2 (2009): 48-70.

Jul 5

“People often claim that talk of ‘rules’ and ‘constraints’ — especially in the context of computer programs — must be irrelevant to creativity, which is an expression of human freedom. But far from being the antithesis of creativity, constraints n thinking are what make it possible. This is true even for combinatorial creativity, but it applies even more clearly to exploration-based originality.” Boden, Margaret A. The Creative Mind. Myths and Mechanisms. 1990. Second ed. London: Routledge, 2004.

Jul 3

“Polya recommended (among other things) that one break the unsolved problem into smaller problems that are easier to tackle, or try to think of a similar problem which one already knows how to solve. He suggested that, if you are stuck, you should ask: What is the unknown? What are the data? Have I used all the data? Can I draw a diagram? Can I draw up a plan for solving the problem step by step? Can I restate the problem? Can I check the result? Can I work backwards? Can I modify a familiar solution-method to make it suitable for this case? All these heuristics apply to problems outside mathematics — even to casting a play, or designing a dress.” Boden, Margaret A. The Creative Mind. Myths and Mechanisms. 1990. Second ed. London: Routledge, 2004.

“The very idea, it is often said, is intrinsically absurd: computers cannot create, because they can do only what they are programmed to do.
The first person to publish this argument was Lady Ada Lovelace, the close friend of Charles Babbage — whose mid-nineteenth-century ‘Analytical Engine’ was, in essence, a design for a digital computer. Although convinced that Babbage’s Analytical Engine was in principle able to ‘compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent’, Countess Lovelace declared: ‘The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform’. Any elaborate pieces of music emanating from the Analytical Engine would therefore be credited not to the engine, but to the engineer.
If Lady Ada’s remark means merely that a computer can do only what its program enables it to do, it is correct, and important. But if it is intended as an argument denying any interesting link between computers and creativity, it is too quick and too simple.
We must distinguish four different questions, which are often confused with each other. I call them Lovelace-questions, because many people would respond to them (with a dismissive ‘No!’) by using the argument cited above.
The first Lovelace-question is whether computational ideas can help us understand how human creativity is possible. The second is whether computers (now or in the future) could ever do things which at least appear to be creative. The third is whether a computer could ever appear to recognize creativity — in poems written by human poets, for instance. And the fourth is whether computers themselves could ever really be creative (as opposed to merely producing apparently creative performance whose originality is wholly due to the human programmer).” Boden, Margaret A. The Creative Mind. Myths and Mechanisms. 1990. Second ed. London: Routledge, 2004.

Jul 2

“creativity can happen in three main ways, which correspond to the three sorts of surprise. (…) The first involves making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas. Examples include poetic imagery, collage in painting or textile art, and analogies. These new combinations can be generated either deliberately or, often, unconsciously. Think of a physicist comparing an atom to the solar system, for instance, or a journalist comparing a politician with a decidedly non-cuddly animal. Or call to mind some examples of creative association in poetry or visual arts. (…) The other two types of creativity are interestingly different from the first. They involve the exploration, and in the most surprising cases the transformation, of conceptual spaces in people’s minds.” Boden, Margaret A. The Creative Mind. Myths and Mechanisms. 1990. Second ed. London: Routledge, 2004.

Jun 29

“The reason another person can plausibly expect to emulate you is that, first of all, people are universal computers and, second of all, people are exquisitely tuned to absorbing inputs in the form of anecdotes and memories. Your memories and links can act as a special kind of software that needs to be run on a very specialized kind of hardware: another human being. Putting it a bit differently, your memories and links are an emulation code.” Rucker, Rudy. The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.

Jun 18

“One shouldn’t place too high a premium on predictability. After all, the most stable state of all is death. We stay chaotic for as long as we can, postponing the inevitable last output.” Rucker, Rudy. The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.

“

What is life? An universal automatist might say that life is the result of three kinds of computation.

Life = Reproduction + Morphogenesis + Homeostasis

And once you have a population of organisms, two additional kinds of computation come into play.

Life → Ecology + Evolution.

” Rucker, Rudy. The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.

“Once this is done by a writer, and of course it is inadvertent rather than deliberate distortion, a host of implications follow in the minds of many if not most readers, such as these: computers — at least some of them — understand water and coffee and so on; computers understand the physical world; computers make analogies; computers reason abstractly; computers make scientific discoveries; computers are insightful cohabiters of the world with us.
This type of illusion is generally known as the “Eliza effect”, which could be defined as the susceptibility of people to read far more understanding than is warranted into strings of symbols — especially words — strung together by computers.” Hofstadter, Douglas R. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. London: Allen Lane, 1995.