Commentary: The creative computer

In an issue of the French magazine La Nature dated June 7, 1890, I found an article about a competition for the design of a tower for the Paris World Exhibition in 1889. The winner, of course, was Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, for his eponymous structure. No less than 68 designs were submitted; 24 of these were illustrated in the magazine article. The designs all bore some similarity to the Eiffel Tower but were different nonetheless, since every designer has a unique and recognizable design style. This leads me to the subject of creativity. Creativity can lead to a diversity of solutions for even a narrowly defined problem. From the point of view of thermodynamics, when a person creates something that wasn't there before, we call such a situation "noise"; there is an "output signal" that we cannot infer from the input signal. Of... [read full story]