Chen-Je Huang
Response of two chapters excerpts from Aaron’s Code
These two chapters from "Aaron's Code" describe a painter's exploration of creating
paintings with computer. In the beginning, the painter, Harlod Cohen, just felt that
learning programming might refresh him intellectually. However, after he discovered that
programming involves rules, procedures, and corresponding actions which could be one
kind of presentation, he created a program called Aaron to draw by following certain
rules. He also added some source of entropy to process the program so the drawings are
not repeated. After years of exploration, Cohen externalized the drawing process and
improved the program. People could consider the style of these program-made art pieces
is similar to Harlod Cohen.
These two chapters do not describe the details of Cohen’s program. They merely describe
some general issues about artificial intelligent such as the difference between human-
made and machine-made.
My response to these chapters has two parts: First, machine–made paintings have same
meaning as real paintings. Second, if we want to talk about a higher level of drawing like
intention and creativity, machine could be a tool such as a brush.
I think that machine-made drawings are equal to hand-made ones. The reason is based on
the idea of creating a series of random number with computer. Most believe that those
random numbers generated by computer are random. In fact, computer only follow the
instruction people gave. These pseudo-random numbers only have the same statistic
distribution as real random number. We could analysis the result with a statistic method
or test if it is predictable to know the randomness. If people agree that pseudo number is
random when they have no idea about real randomness, why people object machine-made
drawing as real if they do not know it is drawed
How could a computer generate random numbers? There are two approaches to do this.
One is through pseudo-random number generators. The other is to sample some entropy
sources outside of computer.
Generators in the first method compute from an algorithm or take numbers from a pre-
