Decius wrote:
] ] Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than
] ] any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B
] ] CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the
] ] Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered
] ] substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new
] ] English words, and trained robotic cockroaches.
] ] Technically.
] ]
] ] Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination
] ] Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all
] ] those things, but he's really just "the man behind the
] ] curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer
] ] program called a Creativity Machine.
]
] This is rather amazing. The article makes what must be
] tremendous programming projects sounds very simple. They guy
] actually has neural networks inventing technologies.

Or, alternatively, the article makes what must be very simple
programming projects sound tremendous. Regardless, there are
some fundamentally plausible elements to Thaler's approach.
(1) Variations of connection strength among nodes in a neural
network provides a huge search space. There would be lots of
room for unexpected configurations to pop up when noise is
applied. (2) Use of a "critic" component to select interesting
variations produces a kind of Darwin machine that produces
useful output. 1.5 million new English words are not useful,
but 20 new English words that suggest that your product not
only whitens teeth but makes the user sexually attractive may
be useful if that is your goal. Some studies indicate that
creative people don't have a larger percentage of good ideas
than others, they just have a lot of ideas, and an ability to
recognize the good ones.