As I was looking at yesterday’s post, I started thinking about a sort of Turing Test for fonts: Would it be easy or hard to design a randomized font — in the style of the one I showed yesterday — so people would not be able to tell that the randomness was machine generated?<\/p>\n
And then I realized that it would be quite easy: You could use a “big data” approach. First analyze a lot of samples of actual human writing, then use those to train a machine learning algorithm. You can then use that algorithm to generate new writing samples. It’s one of those problems that is actually quite amenable to a “big data” machine learning approach.<\/p>\n
But then I started thinking, could we start to arrange all human abilities on a scale from “easily faked by big data” to “not at all fake-able by big data”? <\/p>\n
Some things, like generating randomized fonts, are on the easy end of the spectrum. Other things, like maintaining a long term intimate relationship, are probably way off on the difficult end of the spectrum (or at least, I’d like to think so).<\/p>\n
But what about everything in between? Driving a car has turned out to be more tractable than people had once thought, as have chess and rudimentary translation between natural languages.<\/p>\n
I wonder, is there some litmus test we can apply, to get a rough sense of how easy or difficult it would be to emulate any human task via machine learning, given sufficient data showing humans themselves doing it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I was looking at yesterday’s post, I started thinking about a sort of Turing Test for fonts: Would it be easy or hard to design a randomized font — in the style of the one I showed yesterday — so people would not be able to tell that the randomness was machine generated? And … Continue reading “Train of thought”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16973"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16973"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16974,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16973\/revisions\/16974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}