If I asked a random person in the street to draw a person they'd draw a stick figure. If I asked them to draw the sun, they'd draw a circle with maybe "shine lines" coming out of it. These are a bunch of standard ideograms. My question is: Because these ideograms are based on a visual representation of the object, do all cultures (throughout all ( Read more... )

To achieve my grand goal to get my computer to build me a city from scratch, it needs to be able to create buildings from scratch. There are a lot of different ideas on how to do this, and I'll give a couple in ( this installment. )

The catalyst for this project is the question: "Can computers create art?" My gut feeling is that as impressive as computers are, they cannot create "true art", the kind of art that arrests your very thoughts. They can compute, they can infer, but they cannot make that extra leap. The driving question then is: (  How far can they go? )