142 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
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142 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
happen if I make a call. I will have an interesting conversation or pay
my gas bill. It’s the same with most numbers. If I have a number that
represents the design for a building or a mathematical theorem, these
numbers have purpose. If I input these numbers to a computer along
with some building design software or a copy of Mathematica they
will do something interesting; allowing a construction firm to build a
innovative building or a mathematician to check a theorem is sound.
It’s a lot harder to prove numbers representing art are functionally
useful. A work of art is in some sense not complete — it still needs to go
through the process of being appreciated by someone. We could show it
to a friend or exhibit it in a gallery but this is un unpredictable process.
Van Gogh's paintings were so criticized in his lifetime, many people
would have denied them the label art, and Edwin Morgan’s Loch Ness
Art or Information
Monster poem is almost pure gibberish, but it’s undoubtedly art. Art is
a tricky problem but, in practice, most of us agree on what constitutes
good and bad art. We will look again at art, in Chapter 10.
Classically we assume knowledge is discovered through random
chance and iteration. To understand how this might work let’s lay out
the world’s information in a way we can visualize. Imagine every piece
of discoverable knowledge could be found in an infinitely large library.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015832
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