Saturday, September 30, 2017

Hmm …

… How algorithms are transforming artistic creativity | Aeon Essays. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)



Kasparov argues that the introduction of machine intelligence to chess did not diminish but enhanced the aesthetics of the game, creating a new space for creativity at the game’s highest levels. Today, players of ‘freestyle’ chess work with high-end chess systems, databases of millions of games and moves, and often other human collaborators too. Freestyle teams can easily defeat both top grandmasters and chess programs, and some of the best centaur teams are made up of amateur players who have created better processes for combining human and machine intelligence.
These centaur games are beautiful. The quality of play is higher, the noise of simple human errors reduced, making space for the kind of pure contest that the platonic solids and geometries of chess idealise.
This brings to mind Somerset Maugham's observation that "perfection is a trifle dull." That is also the point of Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder."

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