Computing pi to the umpteenth digit is actually rather easily achieve nowadays by good maths software and and a average desktop pc. In Mathematica 5 i enumerated pi to 1 million digits. Didn't take very long too. I do computer science related topics as part of my training, and being able to recognise a "perfect novel" is really really hard. For one, we ourselves cannot really define easily what makes a perfect novel. Plot? Writing style? Length? and how do we define these? If the computer were able to do such stuff, my we would have made another great breakthough in what is known as Natural Language Processing. People have working hard on this problem as as far as my limited knowledge is i don't think its been done yet. Recognising images is again the same problem. How do you know what a valid image is? Perhaps a smart computer could use algorithms to create a black white kinda outline of figures in it by looking for edges (where the colour difference between pixels is great) and from there try and look for specific figures. But like you said, this would take time. And how many shapes would you want to look for. After that, some screening by humans has to be done. Difficult task no doubt. However instead of a supercomputer perhaps what could be done is to take an approach like SETI, by using screensavers to utilise Personal PC power. By ensuring your function that generates the images generates distinct range of images based on input, you assign a range of images for the computer to generate and analyse. My 2 cents ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Daniel Chia "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." - Thomas Edison E-mail: danielcjh@yahoo.com.sg MSN: danstryder01@yahoo.com.sg ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Ussery" To: Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2004 1:30 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