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Artistic Robots A Rare Breed of Peaceful Robots
Artistic Robots The NY Times has posted a very interesting article about artistic 'bots, as Robots Find a Muse Other Than Mayhem. The talent show, ArtBots, was organised in Brooklin. The definition of both "robot" and "art" is very vague, but purposely so to allow virtually anyone to enter the contest. Here's a funny quote of the article to wet your appetite: "Most entries fell into the category that Mr. Galanter called 'punk-rock robotics', emphasizing cheap components and a playful do-it-yourself approach"." In this case, I don't think any of the robots were actively being creative, rather just creating physical stuff -- which you could probably class as 'Art' ;) An interesting idea nonetheless. | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Saturday 01 June, 13:29 Reply
Jackson Pollocks? As far as I'm aware art is mostly about highly abstract ideas, and I don't think there are any robots around at present capable of having such ideas. The paintings may be of interest to the people, but I'm sure they're of no consequence at all to the robots themselves. The ability to value artistic creations seems to be uniquely human. I know some people have trained chimps and even elephants to paint, but the animals themselves don't ascribe any value to their creations. They don't exchange them with eachother as a valued comodity like humans do. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Saturday 01 June, 13:59 Reply
Couldn't say it better myself... Bob, I can't agree more. The robots described have no understanding of what they are creating. My PhD thesis "Curious Design Agents and Artificial Creativity" makes this very point with respect to agents in art and design -- available at http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rob -- i.e. for artificial agents to create art or design creatively they must have some understanding of what they are doing. The eponimous curious design agents are my initial attempt to make the novelty of works important for the agents. The development of Artificial Creativity systems (along the same lines as Artificial Life systems) mirrors your comment that artists exchange ideas and works as valued commodities. The most striking thing about the paintings done by elephants is that the paintings by a single elephant often display a definite style. I think this is interesting not because I believe that the elephants are trying to express themselves but because it may indicate that they have a preference for certain patterns or painting actions. Then again it could be a reflection of their individual training and their trainers preferences. Who knows? BTW: Jackson Pollock was attempting to replicate the patterns he saw in nature without producing representations of natural objects. In essence he was searching for a way to capture the fractal dimension of the world around us. Research measuring the fractal dimensions of Pollocks' paintings over time showed that as he perfected his skills he came closer to approximating the fractal dimenion of natural scenes. -RoB- | Rob Saunders 47 posts. Saturday 01 June, 16:51 Reply
ART for art's sake That's an interesting paper and some nice applets. I'm interested in the ART algorithm because it might be useful for my robot's vision system. At the moment the robot has a short term visual memory which is maybe similar to the simple ART algorithm, except that the vectors don't move at all and the tollerance is a global fixed parameter. It might be interesting to try using something like the classification ART algorithm so that the tollerance values may vary from one classification to the next. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Sunday 02 June, 06:48 Reply
Category ART Feel free to have a look through the source code provided on the applet pages. I'm afraid that I never really got around to commenting them better but the algorithms are quite simple. David Weenik's papers on his modified ART algorithms easy to follow if you'd rather code from the original source. In addition, you might consider using Growing Neural Gas algorithms that are also mentioned on the applet pages. -RoB- | Rob Saunders 47 posts. Sunday 02 June, 10:05 Reply
Classifying visual inputs I had a look through your code and I've modified Rodney's STVM accordingly. I do remember seeing a video a long long time ago where (I think) Grossberg described his ART algorithm. It was a long boring highly mathematical lecture and I never payed much attention at the time. But reading your paper it seemed like the classification version of ART would be a neat solution to classifying the robots visual input. The expanding and contracting tollerances (receptive fields) mean that the robot can produce fine classifications for objects which are more interesting or more frequently observed, and fairly broad classifications over areas of the feature space which aren't very interesting (such as Grossberg lectures). I don't know exactly how you did it but I just wrote an algorithm such that each "neuron" tries maintain a constant number of neighbours within its receptive field. If there are not enough neighbours the field expands. If there are too many neighbours the field contracts. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Sunday 02 June, 17:41 Reply
Good idea Bob, Trying to maintain a constant number of neighbours per neuron sounds very reasonable. One of my research aims was to show that a model of curiosity could be built with standard components so I just implemented the algorithm as published -- reducing the receptive field by a fixed percentage (eg. 10%) as needed. I'd be interested to know how you get on with your variation. -RoB- | Rob Saunders 47 posts. Monday 03 June, 16:18 Reply
Robokopf On the theme of arty robots here's a funny animation I found: http://www.wired.com/animation/collection/brian_frisk/robokopf/ - Bob | motters 136 posts. Monday 03 June, 03:36 Reply
...most robot artists don't get famous until after they're obselete. That's brilliant. I'm going to be passing that on to a few friends of mine that are also studying computational creativity. -RoB- | Rob Saunders 47 posts. Monday 03 June, 16:13 Reply