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Aaron’s code
McCorduck P., W. H. Freeman & Co., New York, NY, 1991. Type: Book (9780716721734)
Date Reviewed: Dec 1 1991

In the artificial intelligence community, Pamela McCorduck is best known for her 1979 book Machines who think [1]. That nontechnical popular book is in the spirit of what John Searle has called strong AI. Since then, she has co-authored other books in the field. This book is the story of Harold Cohen, an artist-turned-computer freak who ends up designing a highly provocative and ingenious computer program called Aaron to do his painting. It is an attractive, well-written book, and is interesting to specialists and nonspecialists alike. The book contains many black-and-white drawings and color plates of works by Cohen/Aaron.

Cohen is a British artist who was trained at the Slade School of Fine Art at the University of London and has lectured at various schools in the UK and the US. Since 1969, he has had a professorship at the University of California in San Diego. At San Diego he learned computer programming (in FORTRAN) from a student and started thinking about computer art. His knowledge of AI technology improved after he was invited to spend two years at the AI laboratory at Stanford University. By the late 1960s, Cohen was well represented in the art world, with works in the collections of such well-known institutions as the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In the meantime, Cohen was thinking about thinking machines and improving on his machine.

According to McCorduck, Cohen had independently stumbled upon the science of artificial intelligence. “It wasn’t exactly the case that Cohen had independently invented the idea of artificial intelligence. Rather, the evidence suggests that he did indeed arrive independently at the major underlying assumption shared by all scientists in artificial intelligence, and that a subtle one: that the computer is a general-purpose manipulator of symbols and, as such, can fruitfully be viewed as functionally equivalent to the brain” (p. 25).

The book is divided into six parts and appendices. Part 1 contains a biography of Cohen, which is also summarized in a chronology in Appendix 3. The biography includes a listing of Cohen’s art exhibitions and personal data such as marriages and children. Parts 2 and 3 deal with the creation and development of Aaron; the computer program becomes the artist and Cohen becomes the “meta-artist.” He teaches Aaron how to draw and gives it directions for a particular style, but then Aaron creates its drawings independently, and McCorduck says that no two of them are the same. At first, the drawings are abstract; later, Cohen teaches Aaron to draw human figures and plants. McCorduck describes the drawings of the fully developed Aaron early in the book: “Its elegant lines haven’t been preplanned except in a very general way. It’s a computer program, called Aaron, that autonomously decides whether human figures will appear in the drawing, how many, which gender, and where; it’s a computer program that chooses which plants will be in the background--or the foreground--and how they’ll look. Aaron decides where and with what image the drawing should begin. Aaron decides when it’s finished” (pp. 5–6).

Cohen often takes an Aaron drawing, enlarges it, and hand colors it; the results are spectacular. The pictures called the “Eden series” are particularly interesting. Often more than two human figures appear in a picture, and the trees and bushes look tropical.

Harold Cohen’s insight was in appreciating early in his computing venture that the computer’s functions were different from those of ordinary tools. In an essay published in 1973, Cohen outlines his views of perception by computer and the problems of machine-generated art. McCorduck discusses and analyzes these views in chapter 7. In that essay, Cohen asks a lot of questions about the requirements of an art-making computer program and provides some answers. Finally, “he admitted he’d gone part of the way toward realizing such a program and believed that the rest was attainable. He was not, however, a psychologist proposing a model of human perceptual mechanisms. He was an artist trying to fashion a plausible model of art-making, a model that would prove its plausibility by--what else?--making art. If it had no eyes to see, he’d give it the functional equivalent of eyes, an imagination so powerful it could envision a drawing, constantly referring to the drawing’s totality in order to make the next mark on it” (pp. 45–46).

The last parts of the book contain much philosophizing and speculations about AI, science, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, art, and so forth. Here is an example pertaining to Aaron: “Even more interesting, all this art-making can take place posthumously to the meta-artist himself. The computer program retains whatever form it had at the meta-artist’s death, and it goes on drawing in that mode all day every day into eternity (with the help of some technicians who supply ink, change burned-out boards, and do other minor maintenance). Aaron here becomes the equivalent of a (hypothetical) late-Verdi-opera-producing machine, a late-Shakespeare-tragedy-producing machine. Do we really have all the late Verdi and Shakespeare that we want? Of course not: we have only what accidents of history permitted us to have” (pp. 172–173).

Reviewer:  J. A. Moyne Review #: CR115040
1) McCorduck, P. Machines who think: a personal inquiry into the history and prospects of artificial intelligence. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1979. See <CR> 21, 4 (April 1980), Rev. 36,014.
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Arts And Humanities (J.5 )
 
 
Applications And Expert Systems (I.2.1 )
 
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