On this New Year's Day of 2005, I reviewed some of the things I've posted so far. The puzzle post seems the most puzzling. To use a computer to produce a difficult yet simple puzzle makes a great deal of sense as a process towards a rational goal. I am reminded of an even more powerful program that is able to not only compute the simple and complex, but also the beautiful. I refer to the incredible mind of "puzzle master" Scott Kim. If you haven't seen his work before, be prepared to never write a person's name again without trying to write it in an invertible form. Scott honored me one year with a dynamic inversion of my name, which made me extremely happy as it was his little book Inversions that originally inspired me to seek a balance between technology and creativity in 1987.
Machines will always be able to construct a situation of at least 95% simplicity. However humans will be needed to fill in the remaining 5% of elegance that makes the simplicity desirable. Perhaps the fact that I saw Will Smith in I-Robot on DVD last night shows ...
Posted by maeda at January 1, 2005 02:49 PM