The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI

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Harvard University Press, Apr 15, 2019 - Computers - 320 pages

“A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.”
—Jeanette Winterson


What does it mean to be creative? Can creativity be trained? Is it uniquely human, or could AI be considered creative?

Mathematical genius and exuberant polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the world of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning in this essential guide to the future of creativity. He considers the role of pattern and imitation in the creative process and sets out to investigate the programs and programmers—from Deep Mind and the Flow Machine to Botnik and WHIM—who are seeking to rival or surpass human innovation in gaming, music, art, and language. A thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, The Creativity Code explores the new face of creativity and the mysteries of the human code.

“As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we?...In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions.”
Financial Times

“Fascinating...If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.”
The Times

 

Contents

1 The Lovelace Test
1
2 Three Types of Creativity
7
3 Ready Steady Go
16
4 Algorithms the Secret to Modern Life
40
5 From TopDown to BottomUp
61
6 Algorithmic Evolution
75
7 Painting by Numbers
92
8 Learning from the Masters
115
The Process of Sounding Mathematics
174
12 The SongWriting Formula
199
13 DeepMathematics
218
14 Language Games
237
15 Let AI Tell You a Story
258
A Meeting of Minds
279
Selected Bibliography
289
Acknowledgments
297

9 The Art of Mathematics
140
10 The Mathematicians Telescope
158

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About the author (2019)

Marcus du Sautoy is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and the bestselling author of The Music of the Primes, Symmetry, and The Great Unknown. A trumpeter and member of an experimental theater group, he has written and presented over a dozen documentaries, including The Code and The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms. He also created the codes for Lauren Child's Ruby Redfort mysteries. He has received the Berwick Prize, the Zeeman Medal, and the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize, among other honors.