Selma Singer wrote:
Hi Harry,
I think I understand that you're saying that even when the chess players are
playing the computer, they're playing a human.
So, Harry, do you think that if a machine produces something beautiful, that
product is art? Is the machine an artist?
Perhaps you would say that, since the machine is being manipulated by a
human, the product is really being produced by a human?
What comes to my mind is fractals which could not be produced by a human.
I would not be so sure about this. I am not sure what
are the limits of Benoit Mandelbrot's imagination. I would
not be surprised if he can imagine what fractals look like
without "crunching the numbers".
Another thing about pictures of fractals. It is my
impression -- perhaps false -- that the pretty picvtures of
fractals we see are "false color" images. By this I mean
that the person programming the image says that values
of the formula generating the image between x1 and x2 should be
colored green, between x2 and x3 blue, etc. So the
colors are not exactly part of the fractal itself. This
is not necessarily bad, but it does indicate that there
is a lot of human judgment -- be it esthetically or
pragmatically motivated or whatever -- in these computer-generated images.
--
Ever since the invention of the telescope and the microscope,
we have lived in a world of machine-mediated images -- a world
in which we see things that are invisible.
But, making a thought experiment, what different does it make
if something originates from a carbon-based processor that
came out of a birth canal, or a silicon-based processor that
came out of a "clean room" -- if, that is either one or both
happen in the given instalce to think and/or feel? Our
current computers do not think or feel (at least the
ones we persons without security clearances know about,
but I don't see any logical difference between one set of
chemical reactions and another. If the day ever comes that
a computer seems to enter into dialog with me, and I can't
find the little man hiding inside, what should I
hypothesize? Conversely, when one talks with a person
and one cdan predict everything they say and do?
Granted, the human has to put in the information that will make it possible
for the computer to produce the fractal, but is that the same thing as
composing a beautiful piece of music or a painting or a poem or delivering
an opera aria that makes one tremble and cry?
Selma
I've been moved to tears by some fractals I've seen.
I wonder what ones. I generally find some sort
of "pattern" in the fractal images I've seen,
which makes the infinity of details kind of boring.
But, on the other hand, Mandelbrot said that the coastline of
England is infinitely long, which is a different kind of
fractal image (not computed or computable).
--
Let's try this from a different angle:
Another thought experiment: Suppose a computer started
cranking out really great art. Leonardo-ish drawings
and National Treasure grade ceramics, etc. How would you
(I...) respond to these things? How would you (I...)
feel about them. How satisfied would you (I...) be
with the things themselves,as opposed to turning
your attention to the computer that produced them?
Hereis another angle: Why don't more human beings
get on with making things of value, or at least
trying to? And if they can't make them,
why don't they get on with buying them and
patronizing their makers? Etc.
I don't know about your social surround, but I know
mine could be a lot better without any breakthrus
in computer power. I also know that the powerful
things we know computers can do to help us are
not being done or are only being done in
half-assed ways (SGML, again).
\brad mccormick
S.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Harry Pollard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 7:43 PM
Subject: Chess (was If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an
Artist?)
Selma,
I used to be a pretty good chess player, but both my boys outstripped me.
(Chess was the only thing I forced on my children. I made them play when
they didn't want to, then when they weren't bad, I stopped pushing and let
nature take its course.)
Alan reached the top 40 in the country as a professional and to my horror
I
realized he wasn't pushing wood, but playing to a pattern. These top
players look at the board and they see a positive or negative pattern in
the arrangement of pieces - so they move to make the negative - positive!
I haven't played them for several decades. I'm not that stupid.
But to the computer. As I understand it, in Kasparov's matches, the IBM
computer wizards were changing the machine all the time. As information
came in about Kasparov's play, they would make adjustments.
So Kasparov was playing a different machine all the time - until
eventually
he made a mistake and it won - the other games in the match were draws -
as
I recall.
Chess is like all games. People are playing people and although we expect
bluffing in Poker, Bridge, and suchlike - the same thing goes on in Chess
matches. When Alan played, he was not necessarily playing to win, but
playing for the best monetary return.
Then, of course, there was Lasker, who smoked an ill-smelling cigar which
would be puffed into an opponent's face. But, of course, that would never
happen now.
Harry
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Selma wrote:
This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It seems to me that this article fits some of the recent discussions on
this list in some oblique way.
Selma
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an Artist?
January 25, 2003
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN
Ask most chess grandmasters if chess is art and they will
say unequivocally, "Yes." Ask them if chess is also a sport
and the answer will again be yes. But suggest that chess
might be just a very complex math problem and there is
immediate resistance.
The question is more than academic. Beginning tomorrow in
New York, Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked player and
the former world champion, will play a $1 million, six-game
match against a chess program called Deep Junior. It will
be the fourth time that Mr. Kasparov has matched wits
against a computer and the first time since he lost a
similar match in 1997 to Deep Blue, a chess-playing
computer developed by I.B.M. Recently, Vladimir Kramnik,
Mr. Kasparov's former protégé and the current world
champion, tied an eight-game match against another chess
playing program called Deep Fritz.
Whether Mr. Kasparov wins or loses, clearly chess computers
have reached a point where they can compete against, and
sometimes beat, the world's best players. Even Mr.
Kasparov, always reluctant to acknowledge that anyone or
anything might be superior to him over a chess board,
admits that the point at which computers consistently play
better than humans is probably not that far off.
But if computers become better than humans at chess, does
that mean that computers are being artistic or that chess
is essentially a complicated puzzle?
The question arises partly because of the very different
ways that humans and computers play chess. People rely on
pattern recognition, stored knowledge, some calculation and
that great unquantifiable - intuition. Computers, on the
other hand, have a database of chess knowledge but mostly
rely on brute force calculation, meaning they sift through
millions of positions each second, placing a value on each
result. In other words, they play chess the way they attack
a large math problem.
Chess is not the only field where computers have achieved
success formerly thought to be achievable only through
human creativity. In 1997, six months after the victory by
Deep Blue, a competition was held at Stanford University
between a human and a computer to see which could compose
music in the style of Bach. The computer won. Monty
Newborn, a professor of computer science at McGill
University in Montreal who has just published a book called
"Deep Blue: An Artificial Intelligence Milestone," thinks
that the question of what chess is is fairly clear. "There
is no question that it is a puzzle," he said. "Some people
like to imagine that it is an art form."
But if that were the case, some chess players reply, then
why are so many people who play chess well not good at
math? David Goodman, an international master, said that
chess players come from many backgrounds with different
skills. "In international tournaments, it's true, I've
played a grandmaster who became a math professor at 23. But
there are others who were writers and lawyers and even one
who played soccer on Norway's national team," Mr. Goodman
said.
Others do not see the implications for computer supremacy
in chess in black-and-white terms. Murray Campbell, a
developer of Deep Blue who still works at I.B.M., said that
Deep Blue's designers had adopted a scientific and an
engineering approach when building the computer, but that
the results could be viewed as artistic, regardless of what
produced them.
"The question reminds me of the question that often gets
asked in artificial intelligence," he said. "Is the system
intelligent? It is because it produces intelligent
behavior. If it does something artistic, then it is
artistic. It does not matter how it did it."
Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the
University of Alberta who created Chinook, the best
checkers playing entity in the world, thinks that checkers
and chess are art and sport, regardless of how well
computers play them. "As a competitive chess player in my
younger days, when I played a beautiful game, I wanted to
frame it and put it on the wall," Mr. Schaeffer said.
"Chess is also a sport because it is incredibly mentally
and physically demanding. That computers play it better
does not lessen any of the enjoyment that we can get from
the game."
For his part, Mr. Kasparov thinks that chess is art and
sport as well as math and science. If there were a clear
answer about what chess is, he says, "then the game of
chess is over."
Mr. Campbell of I.B.M. worries that chess could be
relegated to the realm of a complex math problem if
computers ever "solve" the game - figure out all the
possibilities and know the result regardless of what moves
are played. For now, while computers have managed to solve
all endgames where there are six or fewer pieces on the
board, it does not seem possible that they will be able to
solve the entire game given that the number of chess moves
in an average game is estimated to be about 10 to the 40th
power. That number is so large, it would take the most
powerful computers billions of years to calculate it.
But, Mr. Campbell said, if computers do ever solve chess it
would ruin it artistically. Already, he said, those
endgames that computers have solved sometimes take so many
moves that the ideas behind them are at times hard to
follow. "That is not beautiful," he said. "It is just
incomprehensible."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/25/arts/25TANK.html?ex=1044502355&ei=1&en=29
ad17fecbf0dd34
******************************
Harry Pollard
Henry George School of LA
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: (818) 352-4141
Fax: (818) 353-2242
*******************************
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<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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