Re: [ccp4bb]: quote 'crystallisation is art, crystallography isscience'

[Gerard DVD Kleywegt <gerard@xray.bmc.uu.se>]

***  For details on how to be removed from this list visit the  ***
***          CCP4 home page http://www.ccp4.ac.uk         ***

> Robots are artists in the brute-force way that a monkey hitting
> random keys on a typewriter from now until eternity will
> eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare (or how
> does that quote go?). The critical thing is the robot has to be
> enough of an art critic to know when he has produced a masterpiece,
> so some human doesn't have to screen all those trays.
> 
> Or better- the artist is the one who programs the robot- the
> robot is just a glorified paintbrush.

see: A.M. Turing. "Computing machinery and intelligence". Mind, A Quarterly
Review of Psychology and Philosophy, Vol. LIX, No. 236, pp. 433-460 (October,
1950). [yes, i really have a copy of that paper]

we can easily devise a Turing test for crystallisation - if i show you a
crystal and you cannot tell whether it was made by man or a machine, then the
machine (if it was made by a machine) has done something artistic (if you
subscribe to the premise that crystallisation is an art in the first place,
obviously)

of course, personally, i think that anything that can be programmed is not art
- the person who does the programming is the artist. (and, to inspire them to
further art, you should always offer such people loads of free beers when you
meet them at conferences and workshops !)

anyway - as someone once said: "everything can be automated, up to, but not
including, what i do" ...

--dvd

[dvd is not in the lab right now and cannot answer his e-mail personally. this
message was generated by dvd_auto_repy.pl v 0.1 with the following
command-line options: --include_entry_from_literature_database
--plug_for_free_beer --end_with_semi_relevant_quote --mostly_lower_case]