Douglas Hofstadter is quoted as feeling threatened by a computer program capable of composing a mazurka "by Chopin", although it has none of Chopin's "soul" or life experience ("Requiem for the soul", 9 August, p 22).
Surely this is where the thinking on AI goes astray. In the simpler case of the chess supercomputer Deep Blue, many programmers are standing on the shoulders of pioneers like Alan Turing, himself atop a mountain of mathematical predecessors. All these synergistic work-years are combined with a vast input from chess experts, rolled up into a few hours and dropped on Garry Kasparov, courtesy of some clever electronics. It wasn't a "computer" that beat him.
With comparable inputs, an adapted linguistics program imitates Chopin under the guidance of David Cope, himself the product of centuries of Western musical tradition. The program merely enables Cope to rehydrate powdered Chopin-soul, and would be ...
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