Creativity 311 and perspective. Once coded the program takes off and is remarkably creative in its compositions, without any further human intervention. However, each new capability must be hand-coded by its creator, Harold Cohen. These paintings give a good visual interpretation for the sort of latitude imposed by the logic limit. AARON can do some very impressive things, but always in a mechanical — albeit beautiful - way, within the rules set by Harold Cohen, the true artist. AARON will not suddenly awake one morning and independently decide to experiment with the color blue! To give an idea of what I mean by ‘mechanical elaboration’ in a musical context, imagine you were using a Casio synthesizer. These machines have all sorts of fun settings. You can program them to play drum tracks, fill in chords, and add a jazzy, syncopated harmonization to your melody. But none of this is truly innovative. It’s mechanical elaboration of your artistic material. Jape, AARON and Emily Howell all do the same thing within their domain. They mechanically elaborate the artistic creation of their human masters. AARON does an extremely good job of this. The Myth of the Design Tradeoff An important consequence of the non-linearity of creativity is we are not constrained by tradeoff laws. Let me explain. | he i 7 4 — Ba — ; # Pe. | a = —— a 2 — =e o | ~ om” ay a Volkswagen Polo HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016001