The Art of Artificial Evolution

Book excerpt: Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world. Leonardo da Vinci Artistic behavior is one of the most valued qualities of the human mind. Although artistic manifestations vary from culture to culture, dedication to artistic tasks is common to all. In other words, artistic behavior is a universal trait of the human species. The current, Western de?nition of art is relatively new. However, a d- ication to artistic endeavors — such as the embellishment of tools, body - namentation, or gathering of unusual, arguably aesthetic, objects — can be traced back to the origins of humanity. That is, art is ever-present in human history and prehistory. Artandsciencesharealongandenduringrelationship.Thebest-known- ample of the explorationof this relationship is probably the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Somewhere in the 19th century art and science grew apart, but the cross-transfer of concepts between the two domains continued to exist. Currently, albeit the need for specialization, there is a growing interest in the exploration of the connections between art and science. Focusingoncomputerscience,itisinterestingtonoticethatearlypioneers of this discipline such as Ada Byron and Alan Turing showed an interest in using computational devices for art-making purposes. Oddly, in spite of this early interest and the ubiquity of art, it has received relatively little attention fromthe computersciencecommunityingeneral,and,moresurprisingly,from the arti?cial intelligence community.