There'd have to be some recognition feedback system to keep it moving in the right direction if it were ever to happen in our lifetimes. There are way more words in the english language than PIC instructions, and way more words in a novel than a PIC program (see earlier post for the math). But of course any sort of guidance would destroy the cool random-factor, making it sound a lot more like boring-old-evolution. With such a system it might not be too hard to pair nouns, verbs, punctuation, names, etc. in the right places to form sentences. Sort of like an out of control mad-libs game... And then the grammatical correctness would of course not guarantee any sort of coherent plot, almost certainly no underlying themes. First we need a computer that simulates a human brain and can read really really fast, and feed in all the best human productions to teach it what is suspenseful, erotic, happy, sad, entertaining, boring, etc... and THEN use it as a feedback system and see what evolves. Might make for some interesting reading after a few hundred years of untended revisions. Of course the flaw with this is that it would only produce things it *thinks* are enjoyable to humans, i.e. what we programmed it to think we like. My bet is it would rewrite the Die Hard trilogy. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Ussery" To: Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 1:30 PM Subject: Re: [OT:] Challenging - Another thought applied to Pics > It's actually pretty cool to think of being able to get useful images, > programs, stories, etc. from random combos of bits, but I see the biggest > problem being not the generation of said information, but rather the > recognition and capture. Say with the latest supercomputers, we can write > 1,000 random novels a second. How do you sort between the purely junk ones > and the useful ones? Given that computer sorting could get rid of the > absolutely random junk, to get a perfect novel, program, or picture would > take an incredibly smart, and therefore incredibly slow program or a huge > group of people. Still would be fun tho... kinda like calculating pi to the > umpteenth digit just for the heck of it. > > - Robert > > -- > http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: > [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads