The Computer Arts Society in association with the Dept. of
Computing, Imperial College is pleased to present:
Harold Cohen
AARON, Colorist: From Expert System to Expert
Tuesday 14th November 2006
6:30pm for 7:00pm
Imperial College
Lecture Theatre 308, Department of Computing, Huxley Building,
180 Queens Gate, South Kensington, London SW7 2RH
Directions to Imperial:
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/contactsgettinghere/travelguidesandmaps
Abstract
For the past twenty years the AARON program has been a rule-based
"expert system," steadily accumulating higher levels of expertise
in coloring its images. Its rule-base has also become
increasingly detailed and complex, to the point where making
changes, or adding new rules, often resulted in broken code
buried elsewhere, deep in the program.
A few months ago its author, Harold Cohen, abandoned this
long-developed, highly successful system in favor of a remarkably
simple algorithm, which not only performed as well as its
predecessor, but also extended the range of AARON's coloring
strategies. This algorithmic approach is now in its third
version, and the program exhibits a high level of control over
the "kind" of coloring it does.
In this talk, Cohen describes the color technology underlying the
new approach and how twenty years of accumulated expertise were
collapsed into a few lines of simple code and how and why it works
as well as it does.
|