140 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? Now spelling does knot phase me, It does knot bring a tier. My pay purrs awl due glad den With wrapped word’s fare as hear. Too rite with care is quite a feet Of witch won should bee proud, And wee mussed dew the best wee can, Sew flaw’s are knot aloud. Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays Such soft wear four pea seas, And why eye brake in two averse Buy righting want too pleas. The Search for Knowledge I hope this explanation shows you the simplest model for creativity -— working through every possibility, and examining them all — is doomed to failure. It would take longer than until the end of time to even list all the options, let alone analyze them. You might wonder just how long it is until the end of time? It’s generally assumed there are two possible ends to the Universe, a Big Crunch or heat death. Either way the approximate estimate is our Universe will last somewhere between one and fifty times longer than it has lasted so far. That’s a long time, at least another 15 billion years, but just generating War and Peace would take 5000 orders of magnitude longer than this! More complex models such as a three-step process have been suggested. We could perhaps randomly create information and put it through a mechanical filter to bring it down to a manageable set of options and then give it to an appreciation algorithm to finally decide whether we have created something. The real problem with this model is the filters. If we try to reduce the effort by assembling works only from pre-existing words, we will have filtered away many works we know and love. Gone are Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas and Roald Dahl, shall I go on? Indeed, once upon a time there were no words, every word was coined at some point. The process of creating art is continually creative and mechanical filters can’t be applied to things they have not seen before. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015830