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Planning for greatness

Authors :
Robert W. Lucky
Source :
IEEE Spectrum. 53:28-28
Publication Year :
2016
Publisher :
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2016.

Abstract

Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman have recently published a book titled Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (Springer, 2015), in which they claim that setting objectives for a project can be self-defeating. • They have been motivated to reach this conclusion through experience with an image-morphing website, Picbreeder.org, where users can “breed” new images by successive selection from mutations of earlier images. By this selective process, users starting with random blobs have produced a number of images that strikingly resemble real objects or faces. However, these images are never generated by setting out with the objective of producing a particular image. For example, someone discovers an image that looks very much like a car, but that image doesn’t come about by starting with the most “carlike” image possible. Instead, it might be found by further breeding of another user’s image that happens to look a little like a car, even though the user who generated that image had something else in mind entirely.

Details

ISSN :
00189235
Volume :
53
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
IEEE Spectrum
Accession number :
edsair.doi...........9416b61ce917b4986e4cf34855351ae2