Automating Creativity

Google Tech Talk September 24, 2015 (click "show more" for more info) Presented by Douglas Summers-Stay slides available at https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bx7HxWsXff3IYUVLRWhMYnd6VjA ABSTRACT In 1843, at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, a machine called The Eureka was exhibited. While playing 'God Save the Queen' and projecting a unique view from a kaleidoscope, it composed, seemingly one letter at a time, a brand new Latin poem which was grammatically and metrically correct. It was just one of many machines which were built throughout history to invent new works of visual art, music, and poetry. Programs like 'DeepDream' and 'A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style' are fascinating new methods for a kind of mechanical imagination, but in some ways they are carrying on a tradition that has been going on since prehistoric times. This talk explores several of these historical attempts and how they differ from human art. It then covers how combining distributional semantic vector spaces with symbolic reasoning allows a new approach to automate understanding and artificial creativity, combining analogical reasoning with deductive reasoning. Bio: Dr. Douglas Summers-Stay is an artificial intelligence researcher at the Army Research Lab near Washington D.C. He is the author of 'Machinamenta: the thousand year quest to build a creative machine.'