paper available

[Juergen Schmidhuber]

                           ALGORITHMIC ART 
                          Report FKI-197-94 
	          (19 pages, non-scientific paper)               
                        Juergen Schmidhuber 
                     Fakultaet fuer Informatik 
                  Technische Universitaet Muenchen  
                      80290 Muenchen, Germany 

Many artists try to depict  ``the essence''  of objects to be represented.
In an  attempt to  formalize  certain aspects  of the  ``the  essence'', I 
propose an  art form called  algorithmic art. It is based on concepts from 
algorithmic information theory. Suppose the task is to draw a given object. 
Usually there are many ways of doing so. The goal of algorithmic art is to 
draw the object such that the drawing can be specified by an algorithm and 
two properties hold: (1) The drawing should ``look right''. (2) the Kolmo-
gorov complexity  of the drawing  should be small (the algorithm should be 
short), and a  typical observer  should be able  to see this.  Examples of 
algorithmic art are  given  in form of ``algorithmically simple'' cartoons 
of various objects, including a pin-up girl and a weight lifter. Relations  
to previous work are established. Finally, attempts are made to relate the 
formalism of the theory of minimum description length to  informal notions 
like ``good artistic style'' and ``beauty''.

To obtain a copy, do:

	     unix>         ftp 131.159.8.35
	     Name:         anonymous
             Password:     (your email address, please) 
	     ftp>          binary
	     ftp>          cd pub/fki
             ftp>          get fki-197-94.ps.gz
	     ftp>          bye
	     unix>         gunzip fki-197-94.ps.gz
	     unix>         lpr fki-197-94.ps

Alternatively, check out my home page:
http://papa.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/mitarbeiter/schmidhu.html

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Comments are welcome. Are you aware of any other mailing lists or 
publishers who might be interested in this work? Please tell me.

Juergen Schmidhuber