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The rationale for the decisions da Vinci made while painting the Mona Lisa are actually pretty well documented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa http://en.
by geraldalewis 15y ago
The rationale for the decisions da Vinci made while painting the Mona Lisa are actually pretty well documented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa .
- mattgreenrocks 15y agoYes, they are. I think we can agree that there is a beautiful elegance to it that is similar to that of mathematics. But that doesn't answer my question, which asked how to write a program that was capable of outputting the Mona Lisa while rationalizing the decisions it is making. Shouldn't we be able to feed everything we know about the Mona Lisa into a program so it could generate something similar? If not, why not?
- geraldalewis 15y agoI'd say that simply because something is rational doesn't mean it can be codified into a computer program (yet). (Maybe my example code disrupted my point more than helped.) The design of most computer programs is rational, but a computer isn't sophisticated enough to program itself. I'm actually having trouble thinking of an important human endeavor this was not in some way rational. Maybe some `Outsider Art` created by mental patients? Programmers who work in `BrainFuck` or `LOLCODE`? I guess I'd only think of something as irrational if I thought a reasonable person would not come to a given conclusion based on the same inputs (such as knowledge, skill, experience, etc).