pjeby comments on What I would like the SIAI to publish - Less Wrong

27 Post author: XiXiDu 01 November 2010 02:07PM

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Comment author: pjeby 03 November 2010 04:04:57AM 1 point [-]

To be precise, what sufficiently-specified compositional problem do you think Emily Howell solves better than humans?

If I understand correctly, the answer would be "making the music its author/co-composer wanted it to make".

(In retrospect, I probably should have said "Emmy" -- i.e., Emily's predecessor that could write classical pieces in the style of other composers.)

Comment author: jmmcd 03 November 2010 10:15:30PM 1 point [-]

To make that claim, we'd have to have one or more humans who sat down with David Cope and tried to make the music that he wanted, and failed. I don't think David Cope himself counts, because he has written music "by hand" also, and I don't think he regards it as a failure.

Re EMI/Emmy, it's clearer: the pieces it produced in the style of (say) Beethoven are not better than would be written by a typical human composer attempting the same task.

Now would be a good time for me to acknowledge/recall that my disagreement on this doesn't take away from the original point -- computers are better than humans on many narrow domains.