05-31-2021, 12:12 AM
There's a difference between "closed" and "solved." Tic-tac-toe is closed and solved; I believe checkers is, as well. The number of possible chess games is large enough that it hasn't yet been solved, only better-played by machines which can look ahead further than humans. But chess is closed.
Baseball, however, is open. Hmm.
Poetry isn't closed, I think, partly because there's no scoring system possible: what constitutes a poem is arbitrary, and once you decide what's a "poem" and what isn't you're left with judging which poem is better. And the judgment is made by the reader, not the poet, which turns poetry into a sport... or possibly an economic transaction.
It may not always be possible to determine which poems are machine-generated and which human-created. But there will always be a ghost outside the machine which says, "This one's good." And the ghost won't care who or what produced it.
Baseball, however, is open. Hmm.
Poetry isn't closed, I think, partly because there's no scoring system possible: what constitutes a poem is arbitrary, and once you decide what's a "poem" and what isn't you're left with judging which poem is better. And the judgment is made by the reader, not the poet, which turns poetry into a sport... or possibly an economic transaction.
It may not always be possible to determine which poems are machine-generated and which human-created. But there will always be a ghost outside the machine which says, "This one's good." And the ghost won't care who or what produced it.
Non-practicing atheist