Planning for greatness

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.