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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more