Letter Spirit technical report available

[Gary McGraw]

  The following technical report from the Center for Research on
Concepts and Cognition is available by ftp (only).  Although the
project described in the paper is not connectionism per se, it shares
many of the same philosophical convictions.
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			  Letter Spirit: 
	  An Emergent Model of the Perception and Creation 
		        of Alphabetic Style

	          Douglas Hofstadter & Gary McGraw

The Letter Spirit project explores the creative act of artistic
letter-design.  The aim is to model how the $26$ lowercase letters of
the roman alphabet can be rendered in many different but internally
coherent styles.  Viewed from a distance, the behavior of the program
can be seen to result from the interaction of four emergent agents
working together to form a coherent style and to design a complete
alphabet: the Imaginer (which plays with the concepts behind
letterforms), the Drafter (which converts ideas for letterforms into
graphical realizations), the Examiner (which combines bottom-up and
top-down processing to perceive and categorize letterforms), and the
Adjudicator (which perceives and dynamically builds a representation
of the evolving style).  Creating a gridfont is an iterative process
of guesswork and evaluation carried out by the four agents.  This
process is the ``central feedback loop of creativity''.
Implementation of Letter Spirit is just beginning.  This paper
outlines our goals and plans for the project.
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The paper is available by anonymous ftp from:
cogsci.indiana.edu  (129.79.238.12)  
		      as pub/hofstadter+mcgraw.letter-spirit.ps.Z
and in neuroprose:
archive.cis.ohio-state.edu (128.146.8.52)
                      as pub/neuroprose/hofstadter.letter-spirit.ps.Z

  Unfortunately, we are not able to distribute hardcopy at this time.  
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|   Gary McGraw           gem at cogsci.indiana.edu   |              (__)      |
|--------------------------------------------------|              (oo)      |
|  Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition   |       /-------\/       |
|  Department of Computer Science                  |      / |     ||        |
|  Indiana University                              |     *  ||----||        |
|                      mcgrawg at moose.indiana.edu   |        ^^    ^^        |
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