Computational Creativity

CSC 261 - Artificial Intelligence - Weinman

1. Write a one sentence 25-word précis of the article by Colton et al. (2009).¹ Your response must be exactly 25 words, as counted by the command-line utility wc. For example,

   $ echo This sentence, though full of punctuation, is not particularly interesting yet it still manages to capture the salient details and be exactly twenty-five words long. | wc

   1 25 166
2. Collins (1989)² writes

   Imagine BACON (or a more powerful version of same) alone on a desert island (supplied with a reliable, wave-powered, generator). Could it reproduce modern science? One immediate difficulty is that BACON cannot do experiments, so let us provide it with the 'data' which it asks for. The trouble now is the meaning of 'data'. . . .

   Now, there are periods when competing collectivities cleave to different interpretations of data. When our imaginary isolated BACON asks for data-on, say, the charge on suspended oil drops, the angle by which light-rays are bent by the Sun, the flux of cosmic gravitational radiation detectable on the surface of the earth, or the sensitivity of living plants to human emotion, whose numbers should be provided? The choice seems to lie between giving it the data which fits best with current thinking, or providing all versions and allowing BACON itself to decide between them (and the many other interpretations of the numbers which are available). In the former case, the machine is not really isolated from society at all. The human social collectivity has made its presence felt in filtering the data-and thus predetermining the results (and this, I presume, is how the actual BACON works). In the latter case it is not at all clear that BACON will reproduce the history of science. It may plump for interpretations of the data which are different to those which we chose. The data and the machine cannot solve these problems by themselves. (pp. 614-616).

   Identify the sentence from Boden (2009) that you find most closely related. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain whether your selection supports, contradicts, or complicates Collins's position.

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