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Cinema of late has become littered with themes related to bogus intelligence, just arguably one of the nearly provocative moments from this genre comes in the film Her when the intelligent Os begins composing music in its spare time. Music has long been used as something of a gold standard in reference to civilisation and creativity, showcasing the best and brightest aspects of the human being intellect. Now The Defence force Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the US military machine, would seem to be robbing humanity of this last emblem of intellectual singularity by teaching an artificial intelligence organization to play jazz.

At first blush, DARPA and jazz music seem like odd bedfellows — and 1 is tempted to ask what mandate the military has for spending taxpayer dollars teaching a computer to play jazz. Is this a instance of government spending run amok? Only as often happens with DARPA, the seemingly innocent headline belies more insidious intentions. The first footstep in unpacking what might be DARPA's real motivations behind this project is to inquire, why jazz, why not teach the calculator to play classical music, or reggae for that affair?

The answer would seem to be improvisation. Jazz requires spontaneous, real-time adjustments in response to changing patterns of behavior. Step dorsum and this sounds remarkably like to the fog of state of war encountered by military generals, where improvisation is frequently the determining factor in achieving victory. It is an interesting thought experiment to ask whether the groovy military commanders of yore like Patton and Zhukov had more in mutual with jazz musicians than they did with chess masters. If this indeed be the case, it shines a new light on DARPA's involvement in educational activity an bogus intelligence to play jazz

Now that we have established a circumstance leading to motive, let's pop the hood and see how DARPA is going about this task. To those familiar with advances in artificial intelligence of late, there won't be many surprises hither. The scientists conducting the projection will first compile a database of thousands of transcribed musical performances by the all-time jazz musicians of all fourth dimension. Then, using a hodgepodge of deep learning algorithms, they will train the AI to observe the salient features of successful improvisation.

While it's uncomplicated in theory, in do, training a deep learning algorithm can be devilishly complex — especially when it comes to cleaning the data and removing outlying examples that could trip up the AI when it attempts to generalize patterns from the preparation data.

The band Compressorhead offers another variation on teaching computers to play music

This band chosen Compressorhead offers some other variation on instruction computers to play music

If successful, the DARPA project will do much more than accelerate the cosmos of jazz music or even presage a new era in armed services strategy. The farther reaching consequences will likely be felt in the effects it has on humanity'southward perceived sense of cocky. For hundreds of years, one of the almost common measures of intelligence was the chessboard. Now that Deep Blue and its silicon cousins take bested their human counterparts in this regard, music, language and art remain some of the last vestiges of homo intellectual superiority. If DARPA'southward project succeeds, information technology's not unthinkable that we will look back upon this as 1 of the final nails in the coffin of human exceptionalism.