Can we finally produce "creative" machines? To answer this question we would first need to define creativity, but let's leave that task for our forums. A sentence from AARON's home page says that ... as computer imitates art and art imitates life, it demonstrates the growing capacity of technology to reflect the subtlety of human experience. Harold Cohen was already an artist with an international reputation in the early 1970s when he started working on this project. His interest in computer programming, combined with the quest to understand how artists use their knowledge when they paint, resulted in this unique example of artificial intelligence in action. While the subtle inner-workings of the program are not easily described in one short article, Cohen did a pretty good job in his essay "Brother Giorgio's Kangaroo", published in Ray Kurzweil's book "The Age of Intelligent Machines". He reveals the mystery works behind the program, explaining the basic reasoning behind the acquisition of structural knowledge about plants and human figures (AARON draws mainly landscapes and portraits). Other related pages describe how AARON progressed from the first stage (approximately 1973 - 1978), which could draw simple but evocative shapes without apparent meaning, through intermediate versions that produced more complicated shapes with a primitive sense of perspective, to the current version with capability to draw and color figurative, three-dimensional drawings.

The book "Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen" describes this project in greater detail. As a programmer, I was fascinated to see the variety of hardware (Data General Nova, PDP-11, VAX, Micro-VAX, PC) and programming languages (Fortran, C, LISP) that were used in the development process. Unfortunately, several important technical details are missing from the book, as it concentrates more on the results than the problems of AARON's creation.

For more details and your personal experiment in computer creativity, download a free trial copy or view an AARON painting in real-time using a Java-enabled browser. And if you thought that AARON is one of the kind, you were quite wrong. Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet is another "artistic" screen saver that writes poetry: it reads a selection of poems by a particular author and creates a "language model" of that authors work. Cybernetic Poet can then write original poems using that model, resembling a style of the analyzed author. Other similar utilities include a Poet's Assistant that helps you write poetry, find rhymes, alliterations, ideas for the next word of your poem, etc.; and 50 professionally designed "poet personalities." More details on the poem generation process are available in the "How it works" section. Another interesting page describes a 28-question "poetic Turing Test" that was administered to 16 human judges with varying degrees of computer and poetry experience.