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adrianNtoday at 5:36 PM1 replyview on HN

There is a bit about this in Greg Egan‘s Disspora, where a parallel is drawn between maths and art. It is not difficult to automate art in the sense that you can enumerate all possible pictures, but it takes sentient input to find the beautiful areas in the problem space.


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SabrinaJewsontoday at 7:43 PM

I do not think this parallel works, because I think you would struggle to find a discipline for which this is not the case. It is trivial to enumerate all the possible scientific or historical hypothesis, or all the possible building blueprints, or all the possible programs, or all the possible recipes, or legal arguments…

The fact that the domain of study is countable and computable is obvious because humans can’t really study uncountable or uncomputable things. The process of doing anything at all can always be thought of as narrowing down a large space, but this doesn’t provide more insight than the view that it’s building things up.