[amitp]

Cool!

When I read Hawkins's book _On Intelligence_ back in the mid-2000s I had thought it'd be cool to generate music by having the system predict what was novel and what was familiar. By mixing some novel and familiar notes/rhythm/tempo/timbre/percussion into the stream I should be able to make new music from scratch. I was annoyed that so many systems trained blindly on existing music instead of using first principles to generate something (although existing music seems useful for seeding the novelty/familiarity parameters). For games especially it would be nice to turn up or down different types of novelty to match what the player is doing.

However, as often happens, I got distracted before I got there. I learned Pure Data, and then got into audio synthesis, and then got into signal processing, and that led to procedural map generation … :)