Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.13
The Dancing Salesman Problem piece from the “No Photos Harmed” exhibition (pic-
tured with the author). The piece is so named, because a solution to an instance of the travelling
salesman problem was used to generate the brush strokes
One of the pieces from The Painting Fool in this exhibition is presented in
Fig.
1.13
. By calling our part of the exhibition “No Photos Harmed”, we empha-
sised the fact that computer generated art can be representational without requiring
digital photographs as input. For instance, the figurative piece presented in Fig.
1.13
has context free design grammars rather than photographs of people at its heart. This
was in direct response to James Faure-Walker's comment mentioned above that the
inception of paintings is via ideas rather than images. Given that the theme of the
exhibition was handing over responsibility, we were asked to estimate how much of
the creative process was supplied by The Painting Fool. In answer, we guessed that
around ten percent of the creativity in the process came from the software. This is a
measure of autonomy in the software that we hope will increase in future versions.
1.6 Conclusions
The Science Museum in London once exhibited some interesting machines made
from Meccano which were able to perform fairly complex differential analysis cal-
culations. As these machines were built in the 1930s, the Meccano magazine from
June 1934 speculated about the future in an editorial article entitled: “Are Thinking
Machines Possible?” (Anon
1934
). They couldn't have possibly known the impact
that the computing age would have on society, but they were already certain about
one thing—at the very end of the article, the author states that:
Truly creative thinking of course will always remain beyond the power of any machine.
At this stage in the development of modern computing, it is neither a foregone
conclusion that we will never see truly creative machines, nor is it obvious that we
