View All Photos
The Creativity Code : How Ai is Learning to Write, Paint and Think – Marcus Du Sautoy
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO

THE CREATIVITY CODE : How AI Is Learning To Write, Paint And Think

Marcus du Sautoy
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK

RM30.00

A Refreshingly Hype-Free And Easy-To-Understand Assessment Of AI’s Current And Future Capacity For Creativity

ISBN 9780008288198
Book Condition BRAND NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Fourth Estate Ltd (HarperCollins Publishers)
Publication Date 19 Mar 2020
Pages 336
Weight 0.32 kg
Dimension 20 × 13 × 2.2 cm
Retail Price RM61.14
Availability: Out of stock

Additional information

Out of stock

SHARE:
  • Detail Description

Description

The award-winning author of The Music of the Primes explores the future of creativity and how machine learning will disrupt, enrich, and transform our understanding of what it means to be human.
 

As a species, we have an extraordinary ability to create works of art that elevate, expand and transform what it means to be human. The novels of Henry James can communicate the inner world of one human being to another. The music of Wagner or Schubert takes us on an emotional rollercoaster ride as we give ourselves up to their sublime sounds.
 
Can a well-programmed machine do anything a human can―only better? Complex algorithms are choosing our music, picking our partners, and driving our investments. They can navigate more data than a doctor or lawyer and act with greater precision. For many years we’ve taken solace in the notion that they can’t create. But now that algorithms can learn and adapt, does the future of creativity belong to machines, too?
 
When artists, creatives and computer scientists leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs to develop art in its many forms, does the code itself become the artist? Or is it a tool for the artist? Could AI be the piece of art itself? In his book, The Creativity Code, Marcus du Sautoy grapples with those issues as computer programs are now used in domains such as painting, music, mathematics and story writing.
 
In The Creativity Code, Marcus du Sautoy examines what these new developments might mean, for both the creative arts and his own subject, mathematics. From the Turing test to AlphaGo, are there limits to what algorithms can achieve, or might they be able to perfectly mimic human creativity? And what’s more, could they help Marcus to see more deeply into the complex mathematical problems with which he so often wrestles?


These are the expressions of what Marcus du Sautoy calls ‘the creativity code’. Yet some believe that the new developments in AI and machine learning are so sophisticated that they can learn what it means to be human – that they can crack the code.
 
• Technology has always allowed us to extend our understanding of being human. But will the new tools of AI allow to us to create in different ways?
 
• Could recent developments in AI and machine learning also mean that it is no longer just human beings who can create art?
 
• And creativity, like consciousness, is one of those words that is hard to pin down: what is it that we are challenging these machines to do?
 
Books about machine learning and AI have proliferated in recent years, creating their own genre. Many address fears of job loss and machines run amok; others celebrate AI as a mechanical savior. Marcus du Sautoy provides a hype-free assessment of AI’s current and future capacity for creativity.
 
Not surprisingly, as an Oxford mathematician, he makes math as much the central character as creativity and machine learning. This will delight math geeks but for everyone else, Sautoy’s exploration of painting, poetry, creative writing and music will entertain and inform. Most refreshingly, he describes today’s advanced AI in terms any layperson can understand.
 
It is hard to imagine a better guide to the bewildering world of artificial intelligence than Marcus du Sautoy, a celebrated Oxford mathematician whose work on symmetry in the ninth dimension has taken him to the vertiginous edge of mathematical understanding. In The Creativity Code he considers what machine learning means for the future of creativity.
 
The Pollockizer can produce drip paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock, Botnik spins off fanciful (if improbable) scenes inspired by J. K. Rowling, and the music-composing algorithm Emmy managed to fool a panel of Bach experts. But do these programs just mimic, or do they have what it takes to create?
 
Du Sautoy argues that to answer this question, we need to understand how the algorithms that drive them work―and this brings him back to his own subject of mathematics, with its puzzles, constraints, and enticing possibilities.
 
While most recent books on AI focus on the future of work, The Creativity Code moves us to the forefront of creative new technologies and offers a more positive and unexpected vision of our future cohabitation with machines. It challenges us to reconsider what it means to be human―and to crack the creativity code.
 
Marcus du Sautoy is the kind of science writer who cares more about questions than answers. In his books he tackles “unsolved problems”, “number mysteries” and “the great unknown”, topics at the edge of human understanding.
 
They are subtitled with words such as “odyssey”, “exploration” and “journey”. But Du Sautoy is a flaneur: his trips are not motivated by destinations. This is both the main strength and flaw of The Creativity Code, a wide-ranging and fact-packed tour d’horizon of current applications of artificial intelligence in mathematics and the arts.
 
Du Sautoy is not only a mathematician — a Professor of Mathematics at Oxford and a Fellow of New College — but he is also a professional communicator, holder of the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, author of a number of books for the non-specialist public, and frequent contributor to print media and to BBC 4.
 
——————————————
About the Author :
 
Marcus du Sautoy is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and the bestselling author of The Music of the Primes, Symmetry, and The Great Unknown. Sautoy has earned a reputation for being able to explain complex science and math to everyday people.
 
A trumpeter and member of an experimental theater group, he has written and presented over a dozen documentaries, including The Code and The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms. He also created the codes for Lauren Child’s Ruby Redfort mysteries. He has received the Berwick Prize, the Zeeman Medal, and the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Prize, among other honors.
[ --- Read more --- ]
You've just added this product to the cart: