Low-complexity art, first described by

Jürgen Schmidhuber Jürgen Schmidhuber (born 17 January 1963) is a German computer scientist most noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, deep learning and artificial neural networks. He is a co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artif ...

in 1997 and now established as a seminal topic within the larger field of computer science, is

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

that can be described by a short computer program (that is, a computer program of small Kolmogorov complexity).

Overview

Schmidhuber characterizes low-complexity art as the computer age equivalent of minimal art. He also describes an algorithmic theory of beauty and

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...

based on the principles of algorithmic information theory and minimum description length. It explicitly addresses the

subjectivity Subjectivity in a philosophical context has to do with a lack of objective reality. Subjectivity has been given various and ambiguous definitions by differing sources as it is not often the focal point of philosophical discourse.Bykova, Marina F ...

of the observer and postulates that among several input data classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the most pleasing one has the shortest description, given the observer's previous knowledge and his or her particular method for encoding the data. For example,

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

s enjoy simple proofs with a short description in their

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of symb ...

(sometimes called

mathematical beauty Mathematical beauty is the aesthetic pleasure derived from the abstractness, purity, simplicity, depth or orderliness of mathematics. Mathematicians may express this pleasure by describing mathematics (or, at least, some aspect of mathematics) as ...

). Another example draws inspiration from 15th century proportion studies by

Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 14522 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, Drawing, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially res ...

and

Albrecht Dürer Albrecht Dürer (; ; hu, Ajtósi Adalbert; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528),Müller, Peter O. (1993) ''Substantiv-Derivation in Den Schriften Albrecht Dürers'', Walter de Gruyter. . sometimes spelled in English as Durer (without an umlaut) or Due ...

: the proportions of a beautiful human face can be described by very few bits of information. Schmidhuber explicitly distinguishes between beauty and

interesting Interest is a feeling or emotion that causes attention to focus on an object, event, or process. In contemporary psychology of interest, the term is used as a general concept that may encompass other more specific psychological terms, such as c ...

ness. He assumes that any observer continually tries to improve the

predictability Predictability is the degree to which a correct prediction or forecast of a system's state can be made, either qualitatively or quantitatively. Predictability and causality Causal determinism has a strong relationship with predictability. Perf ...

and compressibility of the observations by discovering regularities such as repetitions and

symmetries Symmetry (from grc, συμμετρία "agreement in dimensions, due proportion, arrangement") in everyday language refers to a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance. In mathematics, "symmetry" has a more precise definiti ...

and

fractal In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illu ...

self-similarity. When the observer's learning process (which may be a predictive

neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

) leads to improved data compression the number of bits required to describe the data decreases. The temporary interestingness of the data corresponds to the number of saved bits, and thus (in the continuum limit) to the

first derivative In mathematics, the derivative of a function of a real variable measures the sensitivity to change of the function value (output value) with respect to a change in its argument (input value). Derivatives are a fundamental tool of calculus. F ...

of subjectively perceived beauty. A reinforcement learning algorithm can be used to maximize the future expected data compression progress. It will motivate the learning observer to execute action sequences that cause additional

input data with yet unknown but learnable predictability or regularity. The principles can be implemented on

artificial agents In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is anything which perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance with machine learning, learning or may use knowledge represe ...

which then exhibit a form of artificial

curiosity Curiosity (from Latin '' cūriōsitās'', from ''cūriōsus'' "careful, diligent, curious", akin to ''cura'' "care") is a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in humans ...

. While low-complexity art does not require a priori restrictions of the description size, the basic ideas are related to the size-restricted intro categories of the demoscene, where very short computer programs are used to generate pleasing graphical and musical output. Very small (usually C) programs that create music have been written: the style of this music has come to be called "bytebeat".

The larger context

The larger context provided by the histories of both art and science suggests that low-complexity art will continue to be a topic of growing interest. In respect to art history, the potential relevance of low-complexity art extends far beyond the minimalistic Renaissance encoding of beauty already cited in its literature. The idea of an intimate relationship between mathematical structure and visual appeal is one of the recurring themes of Western art and is prominent during several of its periods of fluorescence including that of dynastic Egypt; Greece of the classic era; the Renaissance (as already noted); and on into the

Geometric abstraction Geometric abstraction is a form of abstract art based on the use of geometric forms sometimes, though not always, placed in non-illusionistic space and combined into non-objective (non-representational) compositions. Although the genre was popu ...

of the 20th century, especially as practiced by

Georges Vantongerloo Georges Vantongerloo (24 November 1886, Antwerp – 5 October 1965, Paris) was a Belgian abstract sculptor and painter and founding member of the De Stijl group. Life From 1905 to 1909 Vantongerloo studied Fine Art at the Fine Art Academies in A ...

and

Max Bill Max Bill (22 December 1908 – 9 December 1994) was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer. Early life and education Bill was born in Winterthur. After an apprenticeship as a silversmith ...

. In science and technology, low-complexity art may represent another case in which the relatively new discipline of computer science is able to shed fresh light on a disparate subject — an example being insights into the functioning of the genetic code garnered because of familiarity with issues already raised in the practice of software engineering. The topic of low-complexity art is expected to help foster a continued and fruitful interaction between the fields of computer science and aesthetics. Nor will the insights gained be purely qualitative; the formalizations on which low-complexity art is based are essentially quantitative.

References

External links

Schmidhuber's Papers on Low-Complexity Art & Theory of Subjective Beauty
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20080603221058/http://www.br-online.de/bayerisches-fernsehen/faszination-wissen/schoenheit--aesthetik-wahrnehmung-ID1212005092828.xml Examples of Low-Complexity Art in a German TV show (May 2008)] {{DEFAULTSORT:Low-Complexity Art Computer art Computational complexity theory

Overview

The larger context

See also

References

External links