Harold Cohen Art

.   One of Cohen's creations. - untitled

At a time when the very idea of artificial intelligence was being conceived , Mr Harold Cohen , a British by birth created the program AARON to creat pictures suggesting the potential creativity of the machine. Cohen had written a series of programs ( initially in C language but later in Lisp) which produced pleasing and unpredictable line drawings. These programs explore a certain style of line drawing and a certain subject matter. Cohen's programmes require an internal model of its subject matter which is often concorded with the knowability of human artist about their subject of art. Cohen and people who chose to think on similar lines, hold the opinion that this model is not a physical object. It is a set of abstract rules , perceived typically yet independently by each human mind or the versions of the program in a similar manner creating various point of views.

The purpose of this discussion is to posit the idea that the mind is the result of a computing brain hard ware. It can be simulated by the computational machine and there by delivery artificial intelligence in the most humanised form. It assumes that the images created are representative of the human way of thinking and hence concludes that the computer too thinks in the human way. 

At the same time , computational activity as perceived by the machine functionalist strongly reject behaviourism. According to the behaviourist , to be in a particular state of mind is to respond to stimili in a particular way. Mr JB Winston, considered the father of behaviorism , suggests the notion of causal stimuli. And that is what the machine functionalist reject only to embrace such causal stimuli based state of minds as functional states , an input-output state. 

Such lines of arguments lead to the conclusion that creativity is a misconception and the outcome of various inputs as an out put. Either we have to change the idea of creativity as we know it now or rethink the argument of the mental functionalist. 

The extremely low processing time and ability generate and retrieve memory are the supreme qualities of the computing machine. But what it generally lacks is the ability to drift from its algorithm. Ofcourse a drifting algorithm can solve it along with an intermittent drift- result correlation with utility and purpose. This will the create a human way of thinking and maybe perceiving. This is what probably Cohen wished to present- the absolute mechanistic nature of human creativity limited by processing capability.