The Simple Economics of Open Source

[Will Ware]

In article <390451C0.4B5D3196 at tcac.net>, Albert Wagner
<alwagner at tcac.net> writes:
>You STILL don't understand.  Artifice can only copy.  It cannot invent.
>An end product can be copied, even a style can be copied, but not the
>creative process itself.

Robin Becker (robin at jessikat.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> This position is like the weak AI position; you assert there's something
> magical about creation. I think A Turing was right; any human behaviour
> can be simulated and the best simulators (people) are around already.

Then perhaps, like Turing, it would be useful here to design a test to
decide the question. Can somebody do a good enough job spoofing van
Gogh that no art expert can rule out the possibility that the paintings
are previously undiscovered works? This actually isn't that great a test;
because of van Gogh's fame, the a-priori probability that any van-Gogh-
like paining is an undiscovered original rather than a later spoof is
very small. Are there other talented artists with distinctive styles
for whom it wouldn't be very unreasonable for there to be undiscovered
works appearing?

ObQuasiPython: If one wrote a van Gogh spoofer in Python, it could be
called Goghbot, and it would kinda rhyme, but I don't know if it would
be offensively ungrammatical in Dutch without the "van".
-- 
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Resistance is futile. Capacitance is efficacious.
Will Ware	email:    wware @ world.std.com