Monday, July 02, 2007
The recognizable new
At E-Poetry 2007, I had the opportunity to discuss poetry generation with Pablo Gervás. He works in a broader project, computational creativity. Which, of course, got me to asking questions as just what that means. How would you know that a computer had been creative? Probably the way you know that a person has been creative, the creation of something new.
But not just anything new. The new new has to be alike enough to the old new to be recognizable as an idea in the field under discussion. (There is an acronym in systems design, SUD, which stands for system under discussion and I'm tempted to try to coin another, FUD, but that's been taken. Come to think of it, FUD somehow does seem appropriate. Oh well....)
And this new can't be too radically new, no matter how brilliant. Otherwise lesser minds wouldn't be able to see the innovation--they'd simply scoff or ignore for a few decades (e.g., Gertrude Stein).
Expanding from the previous post, what we want a GA or maybe objective function to be able to do is recognize that a piece be structurally (in all the provocative senses) poetic, but at the same time just a bit different than what's in vogue.
This is why it is so difficult to design a fitness function. What's the target? I discussed this problem with a colleague over lunch recently. His guileless response: Write something entirely different and do it exactly like this.
daniel howe sent me a quote from Nemorov that says the same thing, a bit more bitingly formal:
the poet’s task has generally been conceded to be hard, but it may also be described as to make it logically impossible: Make an object recognizable as an individual of the class P for poem, but make it in such a way that it resembles no other individual of that class.
Hence the fitness function seems an impossibility. But I think I have a way around this.
More soon.
# posted by Jim @ 8:12 AM 
