miyehn-Reading02

Question 1A

Something that “exhibits effective complexity”?! Conway’s Game of Life!! Today in a computer science lecture we learned how powerful Turing machines can be and then we saw a video of game of life simulating a Turing machine and then saw game of life simulating game of life…. I really question my existence now. I don’t know where it sits between total order and total randomness. At its most basic level it has perfect order, but depending on the scale of it that I’m looking at its randomness varies (or at least that’s how I perceive it).

Game of Life at an understandable level (from Wikipedia)

Fractals… what is going on….  (from gameoflife.com)

Question 1B

I think generative art is like any other art form, and the real “art” part resides in the concept more than its execution (because the execution part can be done by any programmer, or any audience’s computer). I have been asked by strangers to send them my code (probably to turn in their assignments from school). I disagree not because I think they’re stealing something from me – what I’ve gained are in my head, they can’t steal my original ideas. I just hate people in the creative coding community violating academic integrity…