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> The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all How does

by goto11 7y ago

> The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all How does that follow? You can enumerate any finite number. And the article doesn't say how big. Is it a thousand or a trillion? "Riehl says the algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.". The article doesn't say how many seconds it took to generate all melodies though.

nybble41 7y ago
> You can enumerate any finite number. Not within a fixed time period in the real world. You're limited by the matter and energy available, and by the speed of light. However we're not talking about the theoretical ideal limits of computation. The upper bound would be 300k melodies for each second since the program was written—68.7 billion in all, according to the Adam Neely interview linked from the Press page of the project site. Which is a lot, but then there are hundreds of millions of known songs, each of which is likely to contain multiple melodies, some of which are much more likely to be chosen than others. Accidental duplication is thus quite likely.