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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more