142 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
happen if I make a call. I will have an interesting conversation or pay my gas bill. It’s the same with most numbers. If I have a number that represents the design for a building or a mathematical theorem, these numbers have purpose. If I input these numbers to a computer along with some building design software or a copy of Mathematica they will do something interesting; allowing a construction firm to build a innovative building or a mathematician to check a theorem is sound.
It’s a lot harder to prove numbers representing art are functionally useful. A work of art is in some sense not complete — it still needs to go through the process of being appreciated by someone. We could show it to a friend or exhibit it in a gallery but this is un unpredictable process. Van Gogh's paintings were so criticized in his lifetime, many people would have denied them the label art, and Edwin Morgan’s Loch Ness
Art or Information
Monster poem is almost pure gibberish, but it’s undoubtedly art. Art is a tricky problem but, in practice, most of us agree on what constitutes good and bad art. We will look again at art, in Chapter 10.
Classically we assume knowledge is discovered through random chance and iteration. To understand how this might work let’s lay out the world’s information in a way we can visualize. Imagine every piece of discoverable knowledge could be found in an infinitely large library.
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