alt Hacker News"Choosing which terrain is worth exploring" is more clear if you have an objective function (if you are doing engineering). But mathematics is closer to art in that regard. What is a terrain worth exploring in art?
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>What is a terrain worth exploring in art?
The joys of parenthood. The excitement of new love. The tragedy of aging. The rise and fall of a great family. Jealousy, vengeance, embarrassment, righteousness, venality. You obviously couldn’t create an all encompassing map of the terrain, but human art has a lot of recurring themes that are clearly “worth exploring” because they’ve consistently been explored in the past. I think the same kind of repetition probably also exists to some degree in other areas of human endeavor. An artificial intelligence could probably suss out a lot of those themes and produce valuable (if not maximally valuable) work without being a mind reader.
Sometimes I wonder if "art" is also just some form of pattern matching on a very meta level.