This section lists all blog posts, regardless of topic.
25 Photographs Taken at the Exact Right TimeNovember 3, 2007
Here's a great set of photos that were taken at the exact right time.
Enjoy.
Can AI write music with a little help?October 30, 2007
Sometimes when I'm sitting at the piano making up a tune, I wonder why a computer couldn't do the same thing... well, not quite. I do appreciate that computers don't know whether something sounds good or not, but they could still be programmed to combine a set of rules/guidelines with randomness to get a new melody, rythm, and harmony. If I were to try this out, I would structure things so that the computer would make something up, and then you as the listener would give it a rating of 1-5 stars. At first it would just be the melody with some basic rythm. Once it had come up with a 5-star melody of a sufficient length, it would add some more rythm to it, and each time it tried something, you would again rate the addition with 1-5 stars. By now you'd have a nice melody, complete with rythm. Time to add in some harmony. This is where there would be lots of opportunity to code in good AI... the complexity/variation is enormous, but if you did a good job, I think it could be a powerful and entertaining way of creating a song, especially for people who know what sounds good when they hear it, but don't know how to make music from scratch. I can imagine a keen 10 year old showing there parent some music that they had made using this approach and it being quite good!
Update: May-08: Apparently Ray Kurzweil did something very similar a few decades back and got lots of press coverage for it :)
Laughing like you've never laughed beforeOctober 30, 2007
We've all had a good laugh... sometimes, often when you're a little tired, if something hits you just the right way, you can almost keel over. But one winters night back in 2002, the Mac Truck of laughter hit me and knocked me down for the count. I was sitting at the computer and had discovered that you could have a lot of fun by writing a program to read in the dictionary and randomly pair words together. Reading through the random pairs was a hoot, surprisingly funny. Every now and again I'd call out to my room mate, Brent, and say "Hey Brent, what do you think of this one". I seemed to be finding better ones every minute, and then I asked "Hey Brent, do you like a
frisky patroness"? I could barely squeel it out, and then I was done for... I fell to the ground and struggled to breath as I laugh, no squeeled, uncontrollably. And just when I thought I couldn't laugh any harder, my diaphragm convulsed even more, and as people walked by they must have thought a poor animal had been sent to the slaughter... it was unbelievable, and it was at least a minute before I got control of my breathing! Who knew you could laugh like that??
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