Fitness Function: Turning the Loop Inside Out
David Norton, Derrall Heath and Dan Ventura
MIND Lab
Computer Science Department
Brigham Young University
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
meaningful images—to be an artist. This requires (among
other things) the development of an appreciation of art, something that itself requires training and experience. DARCI
experiences the world through images, and, much like humans, she receives training through interactions with people.
Through this interactive process, DARCI forms associations
between images and language. DARCI can currently only
form associations between the low-level features of an image and adjectives. However, even given these limitations,
with enough training, DARCI is capable of convincingly describing images with adjectives and can assign quantitative
values to the image-adjective associations. These values act
as the mechanism by which she can evaluate, and thus appreciate, her own artifacts as well as the works of others. (See
http://darci.cs.byu.edu for more details.)
Author Keywords
visual art, optimization, cultural expression
ACM Classification Keywords
J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Fine arts; I.2.m [Artificial Intelligence]: Miscellaneous
General Terms
Measurement, Performance, Human Factors
ARTIST STATEMENT
The process of creating art is an optimization problem for
which the objective function is probably unknown and possibly undefinable. That objective function is imposed on the
artist by an environment which may be composed of any of a
number of sources: peers, a jury, society, the self. This does
not imply that the function is arbitrary nor that the optimization is impossible; however, it does suggest an interesting
interpretation of the artist at work.
BIOGRAPHIES
David Norton is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Brigham Young University. His current research
is in the field of computational creativity and his dissertation
explores the significance of intention and evaluation in the
creative process. His research interests include neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
DESCRIPTION
Human-in-the-loop systems are a common hybrid approach
to the solution of problems for which it is difficult to design
an objective function. For example, evolutionary design often involves the automated production of design ideas that
are then evaluated by a human before they may be propagated further downstream in the process [3]. Other recent examples include collaborative abstract artwork [2] and a system for jazz improvisation [1]. In all of these examples, the
machine is relegated the mundane role of producing ideas
while the human executes the role of judgment. We propose
an art exhibit produced as a synergistic interaction between
human and computer in which these roles are reversed—
humans submit digital art to be juried by a computer system
called DARCI. Feedback is immediate and those works accepted by DARCI are immediately printed and added to the
dynamically growing exhibit.
Derrall Heath is an MS student in the Computer Science
Department at Brigham Young University. His current research is in the fields of computational creativity and multilabel classification. His thesis deals with improving multilabel classification by avoiding implicit negativity with incomplete data.
Dan Ventura is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. His research interests
include computational creativity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks and the application of intelligent systems to problems in medical domains.
REFERENCES
1. J. A. Biles. Genjam: Evolution of a jazz improviser. In
Creative Evolutionary Systems, pages 165–187. Morgan
Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2002.
DARCI (Digitial ARtist Communicating Intention) is a computer system designed to eventually produce original and
2. http://electricsheep.org.
3. H. Takagi. Interactive evolutionary computation: Fusion
of the capabilities of ec optimization and human
evaluation. Proceedings of the IEEE, 89(9):1275–1296,
August 2002.
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
C&C’11, November 3–6, 2011, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
ACM 978-1-4503-0820-5/11/11.
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