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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

The results are meaningless.

This isn't chess or go, where you either win or you don't. Chopin composed for a reason, and it wasn't just an excuse to throw a lot of notes at the page.

It might be possible for AI to work at that level someday, but it's not just a technical problem, and you won't be able to solve it by throwing a corpus of compositions at it.

Aside from that, this still sounds like aimless noodling. It's far more polished noodling with some awareness of genre cliches, but it's still essentially aimless - and so meaningless.

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>This isn't chess or go, where you either win or you don't. Chopin composed for a reason, and it wasn't just an excuse to throw a lot of notes at the page.

I disagree based on your following quote:

> Aside from that, this still sounds like aimless noodling. It's far more polished noodling with some awareness of genre cliches, but it's still essentially aimless - and so meaningless.

This sort of problem can easily be reframed as a win or lose problem, we simply consider whether the music sounds good or not. More concretely: would this music be able to convince you that a gifted human composer created it?

I'm fine with the answer being no, but I don't understand why the original comment I replied to wrote off the entire exercise. No we may not be there yet, but this seems like a good step forward to me.

> More concretely: would this music be able to convince you that a gifted human composer created it?

Would a computer? If it could, then in theory it could use that as an optimization goal...

Yes, that is what he is saying...

I think the core difference of opinion here seems to stem from a different interpretation of "meaningless".

You're arguing an academic definition of meaningful: can you design an AI that solves a hard problem?

gambler (and I think TheOtherHobbes, who you are replying to) are arguing a practical definition of meaningful: does it solve a problem people actually have?

It's neat that you can make artificial music, but actually generating music, per gambler's original comment, isn't a problem people have. It also doesn't actually add too much to culture. Essentially, the results are "meaningless" in that, even if it was successful at sounding good, what value would it actually have besides novelty?

One thing I can think of is making it faster and easier, maybe even for people who are less skilled in music to generate music that sound good.

That is valuable to me.

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