It's interesting to think about this from a more general perspective: what if we're not limited to midi, and we're talking about a more general kind of _design_

It's interesting to think about this from a more general perspective: what if we're not limited to midi, and we're talking about a more general kind of _design_ problem, where the design problem is to select a good solution to a problem within some (large) but finite and theoretically enumerable search space. We can think of selecting a good melody to fit into a song as one example of a design problem -- searching through some finite enumerable space of melodies and selecting a melody that's a good fit. A lot of the effort in this process is testing and evaluating the melody to see if it is any good to listen to / any good in context. This effort hasn't been done if you simply brute force enumerate and list the search space without testing anything. There are many kinds of design problems where the effort of checking if a proposed solution is any good vastly outweighs the effort of suggesting a solution. We could do the same thing for other kinds of design problems. In principle, what if we enumerate some (vast) finite space of digital circuits -- if we put a few limits on the amount of stuff we can put into a single circuit, and discretise any continuous parameters to produce a finite space. Does that mean we can copyright all these possible circuits, even if we put no effort into seeing if any of them are fit for any purpose? Can we enumerate some large finite space of possible arrangements of atoms into molecules and then copyright them all, without putting any effort into analysis or experimental testing to see if any of the proposed molecules are fit for any purpose? Snisarenko made a similar criticism when this was posted 15 days ago: > As other commenters have pointed out, this is gimmicky, shallow and clickbaity. All that they did was count from 1 to 68 billion. Any piece of digital data can be converted to a number, and if we apply their argument then you can be "creative" by just counting numbers. But we all know that's not true. Once the search space becomes that big, you can't actually "enjoy" any of these melodies. Because you can't listen to all of them in your lifetime, the ones that you WILL hear are going to be awful 99.999 percent of the time. Hence, the "creative" process is navigating this search space, and figuring out which melodies are catchy. Better yet, trying to figure out how or why our brain decides to like or not like a melody. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306857 From my perspective of framing this situation: this is dumb, as no design of any melodies has been performed. The design is the uniform prior distribution over some space of all possible melodies, most of which will be uninteresting / not fit for any particular purpose, which is a pretty uninspiring notion of design.