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From: edhall@rand.org (Ed Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Reply to Laske (was: Re: Music Research Digest Vol. 5, #14)
Message-ID: <1990Feb26.091939.3171@rand.org>
Date: 26 Feb 90 09:19:39 GMT
References: <132035@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <14095@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
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Reply-To: edhall@rand.org (Ed Hall)
Organization: The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA
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In between Eliot's personal attacks on Otto Laske lies a lot of commentary
I must humbly agree with.  There should be a special place in hell
reserved for the person who coined the term ``knowledge engineering.''
Like so much in AI, a term which started as a metaphor has been erroneously
accepted as a factual entity and then further perverted into marketing
hype.

The techniques which fall under the rubric ``knowledge engineering''
are clever tricks for organizing the development of computer programs,
but hardly represent the revolution that has been claimed for them.
Successful projects have tended either to be solutions to toy problems
or to involve subject areas with innately limited complexity.  This
makes it especially silly to see it proposed for a field as profoundly
open-ended as musical composition.

At the very best, Laske will come up with yet another technique of
computer-aided musical composition.  This is just fine by me.  But
insofar as musical creativity derives from the peculiarly distinct
experiences and abilities of human beings combined with their
relationships to a kaleidescopically changing world, his project will
necessarily result in a frozen and incomplete representation of the
creative process.

		-Ed Hall
		edhall@rand.org