I look down at my keyboard and type quickly, almost perfunctorily.
(define process-maker
(lambda(f)
(let([saved-continuation '<a-continuation>0]
(let([update-continuation! (lambda (v) (set! saved-
continuation v))])
(let ([resumer (resume-maker update-continuation!)]
[first-time #t]
(lambda (value)
(if first-time
(begin
(set! first-time #f)
(run-cycle
(lambda 0
(f resumer value))))
(saved-continuation value))))))))
I am writing a book on Scheme, an artificial intelli-gence language. It is actually the third book in a four-part series. My books are published by the University of Indiana Press, a few blocks away from my office. My editor, Elliot Osman, works at Rice University, in Texas. I used to mail him my manuscripts, but now I send facsimiles. I haven't actually seen Elliot in three years.
I was born in a small town in Connecticut in 1947. Back then, computers were reserved for comic books and science-fiction stories. In high school, I became interested in mathematics, and eventually symbolic logic. Most kids idolized Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. My walls were decorated with photographs of Bertrand Russell.
My parents were both born in Germany and had fled to the U.S. in 1931.
"America is the only place left for the Jews," they often told me. All of their relatives were killed in the Holocaust. We rarely mentioned the word Germany and they never spoke German. When I found I needed to study it in graduate school, I didn't tell my parents.
They never quite understood my interest in math. At synagogue, my mother would listen uncomfortably as her friends bragged about their sons at medical school. My father once told me,
"A Jew in America has choices. Mathematics? Computers? You choose this over medicine and saving lives?"
But today, my books line their shelves --unread, but pointed out to every neighbor that drops in. When I fly to Florida to visit them, everyone in their apartment building knows me and calls me "the computer kid."
I love my parents and understand why they were so worried about me. We laugh about it now. "Your generation and ours, maybe there is a difference," my father says. "Our son, the genius," my mother brags.
I'm married and have two wonderful children. My wife, Rachel, is a painter and an art historian. She also teaches at the University. My two sons, Eric and Matthew, are in high school. They are studying science and art. I am proud of them. I can't think of a better way for them to be learning.
I'm not particularly wealthy. We certainly have enough --my family is well-fed and clothed. The University provides me with a house, and during the summers, I usually have plenty of spare time to spend with my wife and children. I think I appreciate Winter Break even more than my students do.
Back in 1971, after I finished up grad school, I met Rachel. We were both drunk at a cocktail party, arguing (somewhat futiley, I recall) about whether monkeys could ever rewrite Hamlet or sculpt Michelangelo's David. She said to me, "You mathematicians are all alike." I told her, "It's about time you artists realized that things happen for reasons." When I ran into her a week later, we both apologized, went out for a cup of coffee, and fell in love.
A year after we got married, I received a fellowship from the newly-formed computer science department at Indiana University. We moved away from Boston and settled down for what we thought would be a year. Of course, we haven't left yet. As our first year wound down, the University offered me a position on the faculty, and we had out first child.
(define resume-maker
(lambda (update-proc!)
(lambda (next-coroutine value)
A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose upon the beholder even before he can identify
the subject matter. (let [(receiver (lambda(continuation) (update-proc! continuation) (next-coroutine value))]) (cal/cc receiver))))))
Sometimes artificial intelligence scares me. People constantly hit me with what my colleagues and I refer to as "moral bricks."
Like: "Are you going to feel guilty when computers take over the world?"
And: "Are you trying to make machines into humans, or humans into machines?"
Or: "How will you feel when a computer takes your job?"
I never know exactly how to answer these questions. I basically feel that A.I. will help us better understand how humans think. If we can get machines to create, we will certainly understand how we create. However, I still worry about those questions from time to time.
When my son Eric turned nine, he asked me about sex. I started to explain to him, as simply as I could, that sex was a means for reproduction. After a few hours of discussing the issue with him, he seemed satisfied. He brought it up again a few weeks later, in the form of a real stumper. He said, "If a computer is used in a factory to make another computer is the computer having sex?" I answered that in my first full-length book, Reproduction, Artificial Intelligence and the Computer. I read the book with Eric last year, explaining that he had been the cause of my inquiry. He laughed and said he didn't even remember asking the question in the first place. We ordered out for pizza that night, and the whole family sat around the television, watching 2001 on videocassette.
The life in art is a "life" of forms, or even of space itself.
(define S-and-n list?
(lambda (1st)
(and (not (null?lst))
(symbol?(car 1st))
(not (null? (cdr 1st))
(number? (cadr lst)))))
This purely visual space is an illusion, for our sensory experiences do not ever agree completely on it.
I think there are two major approaches to A.I. --theoretical and practical. I think I am more of the latter. Theories intrigue me, but programs excite me. One early project of mine, certainly a practical program, was a recipe-maker. On a very basic level, it involved inputting over one hundred simple recipes --meatloaf, tuna casserole, cheese omelettes. After the program was activated, the program produced fifty completely new recipes. The success rate was astonishing. Nearly all of the recipes were edible, and many of them were quite tasty. I take great pride in some of the dishes --the chicken burger, the broccoli steak, the egg pudding. I think that program anticipated my later work.
My wife and I often talk about teaching a computer to draw or paint. This is much more difficult than teaching a computer to create recipes. A colleague of mine created a program that made drawings reminiscent of Piet Mondrian's, but my friend was ultimately unsatisfied with the results. The program, he felt, was not creating anything very original, like Mondrian had. However, if a computer could create it's own style, that, he felt, would be an accomplishment. He has been working on the project for seven years now, and he often visits my wife to discuss his problems with the program.
Graphic rendering is never a copy of direct visual impressions, but formulation, shaping, and defining of these impressions.
(define vector-length
(lambda (vec i)
(if (vector? Vec)
If, therefore, the artist presents semblances of objects,
people, landscapes, etc., it is for their visual values
as portions of perceptual space.
(1et([highest-index(subl(vector-length vec)))] (if(and (>=0) (<=i highest-index)) (vec i) (error "vector-ref: "i" not in range to" 0 to highest-index))) (error "vector-ref: "ref" not a vector.")))) Painters must paint for their own edification and pleasure. Before I met my wife, I never considered myself to be an artist, and until my wife met me, she never considered herself to be a scientist. Now, neither one of us is too sure. Rachel once read a quote to me from a book called The Art Spirit. She said, "The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea. He should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express." And I read to her from The Scientist and the World. "The scientist is an observer, a creator, a questioner. He is active and passive, overwhelmed and in control, of all ideas and one idea. He is, ultimately, solving what intrigues him most." The quotes seem devastatingly similar, and I often interchange the words "scientist" and "artist" and find that the statements almost read the same. I've been plowing through a lot of fiction lately. Last year I read most of Shakespeare, and now I'm tackling some early American literature --Melville, Hawthorne, Poe-- that sort of thing. My wife, meanwhile, has started to read some of my old college books on science and math. We usually discuss them at night, when the kids are asleep or out. Sometimes the questions she asks remind me of the ones I used to ask back in college. I'm sure she feels the same way about my questions about literature. My children seem to be doing the right thing --reading everything from philosophy to poetry. I think they have the advantage of being brought up in a "two cultures" house that seems to be merging into one culture. My son Matthew used to do watercolors of physics formulas and concepts. My favorite, beautifully framed and hung in my office, is called. The Heisenberg Painter. It depicts a man drawing a picture of a man drawing a picture of a man drawing himself in a mirror. Each man looks slightly different than the prior, and my son once told me, "I wish observation were a bit less fallible." I had to agree with him. The primary illusion of any art genre is the creation wherein all elements exist. (define flatten (lambda (1st) (cond Sculpture is literally the image of kinetic volume in sensory space. [(null? lst'O] [(pair? (carlst)) (append (flatten (car 1st)) (flatten (car ] [else (cons(car 1st) (flatten (car lst)))]))) All the arts exercise a certain hypnotism. My mother once told me that happiness was the easiest thing in the world to achieve. It is the little things, she said, that make a person happy. The problem was finding out what these things were, then doing them. I think I know what makes me happy, and so I do them. My wife and children are happy as well. I am almost done with my book. That makes me happy. My wife is teaching a course on particle physics and art. That makes her happy. My kids are down the street playing football. That makes them happy. This is what is important. Every real work of art has a tendency to appear thus dissociated (define set-builder from its mundane environment. The most immediate (lambda (pred? base-set) impression it creates is one of "otherness" from reality-- (lectrec the impression of an illusion enfolding the thing, action, ([builder statement, or flow of sound that constitutes the work. (lambda (s) Even where the element of representation is absent, where nothing (if (empty? s) is imitated or feigned --in a lovely textile, a pot, a building base-set a sonata&emdash; this air of illusion, of being sheer image, exist as forcibly as (let ([elem (pick s)]) in the most (if (pred? elem) deceptive picture (adjoin elem (builder ((rest-set-elem) s)))) or (builder((rest-of-set elem) s)))))))]) the most plausible builder))) narrative. Author's Note: The boldfaced quotes are adapted or taken directly from Susanne K. Langer's Feeling and Form. The A.I. computer programs are taken from Daniel P Friedman's An Introduction to Programming Using Scheme.
