Skip to main content

The Creativity Code - Marcus du Sautoy *****

At first glance this might just be another 'What AI is good at and not so good at' title. And in a way, it is. But, wow, what a brilliant book! Marcus du Sautoy takes us on a tour of what artificial intelligence has achieved (and possibly can in the future achieve) in a range of fields from his own of mathematics, through game playing, music, art and more.

After a little discussion of what creativity is, we start off with the now very familiar story of DeepMind's AlphaGo and its astonishing ability to take on the hugely challenging game of Go. Even though I've read about this many times before, du Sautoy, as a Go player and mathematician, gives a real feel for why this was such a triumph - and so shocking. Not surprisingly he is also wonderful on what mathematicians actually do, how computers have helped them to date and how they have the potential to do far more in the future. After all, mathematics is by far the closest science to game playing, as it has strict rules established beforehand, where with most other sciences we really don't know what the rules are and have to try to work them out as we go along.

My only slight moan about the mathematical aspect of the content is that there are so many references to the mathematical discipline of symmetry and group theory that it would have been nice to have had an a little backgrounder on these to put what is being talked about into context. Having said that, though, given the inevitably slightly scary aspect of AI potentially taking over some of the roles of mathematicians, du Sautoy gives us an excellently balanced and fair assessment of how some mathematical AI projects really do very little to advance the field, while others really do eat into the mathematician's work.

Perhaps my favourite chapters of all were those on music. There is, of course, a distinctly algorithmic feel to composition theory, and du Sautoy really makes his exploration of this delightful. I'm familiar with a lot of Bach's work, but not The Musical Offering - which du Sautoy argues well was a particularly algorithmic feat. Apparently, Bach was asked if he could improvise a fugue from a very tricky 'tune' dreamed up as a challenge by Frederick the Great - not only did Bach manage a three part version on the spot, he went on to compose 11 variants using all sorts of remarkable modifications. A particular bonus was being able to summon up The Musical Offering on Spotify (itself an algorithmic marvel on a good day) and listen to it as I read the book.

I wasn't quite as taken with the sections on art. With modern art it's arguable that it's pretty much impossible to define what good art is (du Sautoy points out how difficult it is to fake a Jackson Pollack if you know technically what to look for... but I still find his paintings a visual mess that I wouldn't hang in the toilet, so I don't really care that it's hard to reproduce). With such an arbitrary borderline between creativity and randomness, it's hard to worry too much about what an AI can do - it all seems to be a matter of fashion anyway. These chapters were still interesting, just less significant for me. My interest revived, though, when he got onto approaches to writing, even if there was nothing there that seemed likely to displace human work any time soon.

All in all, a great crossover title between computing, mathematics and creativity, presented with du Sautoy's usual charm and clarity. Excellent.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more