Funny you should say that when he just said *you're* sticking to a primitive definition of "algorithm". You can't imagine anything *people* do (in particular anyone on this list, since that's a convenient group to pick on) that's new or creative. Maybe it's *your* creativity that's limited, in that your imagination can't follow where our imaginations tread. I can easily imagine a program (not an algorithm, mind you, but a collection of data structures and algorithms interacting with the real world in all its glorious complexity and surprisingness) from which creativity emerges. How did all those fonts come about? The randomness of the real world, interacting with the pattern recognizers and learning mechanisms that live in the human mind. Nobody thought them up from scratch.
I'm a musician and songwriter in my spare time, which requires creativity. The worst insult to a song writer is to say that it sounds just like another song (unless all he cares about is getting paid, in which case formulas work great). When I write songs, I start by picking up the guitar, and fiddling around randomly until I hear something interesting come out. Then I reverse engineer what I just accidentally produced, and I start thinking about how to generalize the "feel" of it so I can produce more that goes with it. I try things out, and build onto it, not by thinking ahead, but by stumbling in the right direction and either backtracking if it sucks or holding on to what I've done if it sounds good. This goes on throughout the entire process of writing a song. My experience as a song writer serves as a general guide to determine the direction I'm going in and reduce the number of bad ideas and false starts I have to try out before I stumble onto a good one, but ultimately writing a song comes down to accumulating a lot of awesome mistakes together according to a strict measure of what sounds good to me. This, I suspect, is exactly what other artists and creators go through when they create anything at all. There's nothing particularly hard about implementing any of this in a computer program aside from determining the measure of goodness, which we humans have built in due to evolution. To make it general across multiple domains and not just one, we would have to also build in a way to detect the space of possibilities, such as that for a guitar, there are such-and-such notes, or for a canvas, there are x and y coordinates related to each other by a Euclidean distance metric. This is also do-able, albeit probably a lot more difficult. How much experience do you personally have with creating things, that you can sit in judgment of us and say we don't know what creativity much less how to build it? Are you a musician? An artist? A programmer? A writer? A philosopher? What? On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 9:31 AM, Mike Tintner <[email protected]>wrote: > Frankly, Jim, definitions are for wankers. The last resort of s.o. who > doesn’t want to get anywhere. > > Your ideas about algorithms’ powers are fictional. There isn’t an > algorithm in the world that isn’t mindblowingly limited – that just > “builds” Lego houses and no other kind of structure, or “cooks” one set of > dishes and nothing else. > > Take just about any verb you like – “travel”, “fly”, “calculate”, > “compute,” “translate,” et al – and an algorithm will only be able to do > one hyperspecialised version, compared to the infinite possibilities. > > Show us something actual and general/creative, with new elements, that > algos can do - or please stop wasting air. > > > > *From:* Jim Bromer <[email protected]> > *Sent:* Sunday, October 14, 2012 3:13 PM > *To:* AGI <[email protected]> > *Subject:* Re: [agi] ONE EXAMPLE > > Mike, > How many times does it take to get this idea across to you. You are > confusing a primitive definition of algorithm - which might be currently > acceptable to many people - as a fundamental notion of the characterization > of a computer program. > Jim > > On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Mike Tintner > <[email protected]>wrote: > >> *P.P.P.S. Just to ram this home -* >> ** >> *UNLESS you do something like I’ve suggested, (and I know none of you >> have) -* >> ** >> *a) tackle a proper creative problem (and what better than >> geometrical/math ones for you?) -* >> ** >> *(you don’t have to come anywhere near solving it, just have a go at >> it), and then* >> ** >> *b) try and algorithmise/systematise your thinking -* >> ** >> *unless you do that, you will NEVER understand AGI.* >> ** >> *If you do, note what is the “set of elements”/options to be thought >> about here? (there never is one).* >> ** >> *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> >> <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10561250-164650b2> | >> Modify <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Your Subscription >> <http://www.listbox.com> >> > > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/6952829-59a2eca5> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/23050605-bcb45fb4> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
