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ae

ae is a toy aesthetic evaluator. It generates simple descriptions of aesthetics, basically just a list of valenced criteria. It also generates descriptions of artworks consisting of a number of figures, each described by a list of valenced properties. It then evaluates artwork against aesthetic and gives the artwork a numeric score, a measure of its value under that aesthetic.

Precedents

I wrote ae before I'd read Gips and Stiny's "Algorithmic Aesthetics" (University of California Press, 1979 - http://www.algorithmicaesthetics.org/), but I was certainly inspired by the idea of the possibility of an algorithmic aesthetics.

The structure of ae's ontology, with specific concepts generalisable to more broader concepts, is inspired by Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell's work on CopyCat, described in the book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies".

Running ae

To run ae, change to the directory rob-art/ae and run the file run.lisp there.

     $ cd ae
     $ openmcl --load run.lisp