special-purpose “idiot savants”, like the other two examples.
No, it’s quite different from the other two examples. Deep Blue beat the world champion. The evolutionary computation-designed antenna was better than its human-designed competitors.
dumb brute force is already “smarter” than human beings in any narrow domain
To be precise, what sufficiently-specified compositional problem do you think Emily Howell solves better than humans? I say “compositional” to reassure you that I’m not going to move the goalposts by requiring “real emotion” or human-style performance gestures or anything like that.
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.
No, it’s quite different from the other two examples. Deep Blue beat the world champion. The evolutionary computation-designed antenna was better than its human-designed competitors.
To be precise, what sufficiently-specified compositional problem do you think Emily Howell solves better than humans? I say “compositional” to reassure you that I’m not going to move the goalposts by requiring “real emotion” or human-style performance gestures or anything like that.
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.)
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.