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Re: Announcement

Alex,

Thanks for putting this little announcement up on the front page. I am very surprised to see it make the news. ;-)

Erm... I just want to point out that it is not the curious design agent that generates the forms, in fact it is a general-purpose agent that uses a generative art system in the same way that a person using the same system would. I've actually used the same agent architecture (but with a slightly simpler vision system) to evolve Karl Sims' style images -- see my papers on "artificial creativity" on my academic home page for more information.

Personally I find the idea of an agent using a generative art system in the same way as a person more exciting than if I had written an agent only to produce these images. Maybe one day I'll be able to incorporate some of this stuff into Fear and make bots that stop mid-fragging to paint a picture? ;-)

Sorry to be a pedant but you know how it is when it comes to your academic research... :-/

-RoB-

47 posts.
Tuesday 06 August, 19:59
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Curiosity killed the cat

I quite enjoyed doing your experiment, managed to take a look at some interesting designs! It would be interesting to be able to look at the results afterwards though, I felt a little cheated when I finished and realised that the results weren't displayed at the end.

What technique are you using for the user modelling?

I'm assuming curiosity agents can be applied to anything that involves a measure of human subjectivity. If an agent can learn all manner of likes and dislikes of the subject then it can work as an information gathering agent - music, intellectual interests, news, art, the list is endless. The web is the ideal ground for something like this to opperate. It could also be a handy marketing tool - agents that actually learn what a user likes and wants: the ultimate market research tool!

Linden

26 posts.
Wednesday 07 August, 09:20
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User Modelling? Not me...

Linden,

Thank you for taking the time to do the experiment. I'm glad you enjoyed exploring the space. In the future I'll be creating more general interactive evolutionary tools to explore other design spaces. I'll be sure to post any announcements here.

I'm sorry you felt cheated at the end of the experiment but you really don't have to. The truth is that you could see the results for both parts of the experiment in the bar graph. This shows how much the agent agrees or disagrees with your choices. A peak in the graph on the left-hand side means that you and the agree generally agree. I'll write some more about the significance of the results once the data is collected.

I can understand your confusion about not seeing the "results". Perhaps you were expecting to see a collection of images that would somehow capture your preferences? As one might expect with user modelling. However, I think the really cool thing about this system is that I'm not doing user modelling: I'm actually comparing a computational model of curiosity based on theory and previous empirical study with the behaviour of people using a generative art tool to see how well they match. In other words, in this experiment I'm comparing the behaviour of an Artificial Intelligence with a Real Intelligence -- in a very limited domain!

The surprising thing is that the model tends to a pretty good job of predicting people's selections even without user modelling in the more traditional sense.

You're not the first person to assume that what I am trying to do is capture a set of user preferences. In the future I hope to combine user modelling with the model of curiosity to provide a more accurate predictor of a user's selections -- this would be useful if people were trying to use a curious assistant to design something with a particular aesthetic not prescribed by the generative system.

The problem with using traditional forms of user modelling with an art or design system like this one is that they tend to learn the "average" of a person's likes and dislikes but when a person is exploring a space they don't want to see the same things again and again. In some sense a curious agent does exactly the opposite of this type of user modelling because it is always looking for designs that are different and therefore more "interesting". Instead of trying to model a person's preferences for design products I am using a model of a person's design process within the limits of the tool.

I should probably add a section to the background information section of the introduction to the experiment to say that I'm not doing user modelling.

I'm glad that you can see some potentially exciting applications for curious agents. I'm certainly very excited about what these agents could do when partnered with conventional user modelling techniques. When I combine a curious agent with a user modelling system I will want the user modelling system to learn those qualities of selected works that are constant -- i.e. to learn prototypes for selections that cannot be explained by the model of curiosity.

I plan to write an article about my study of curiosity and creativity for AI-Depot after I got my current batch of papers finished. :-)

-RoB-

47 posts.
Wednesday 07 August, 10:46
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