Aesthetic Evaluation of Cellular Automata Configurations Using Spatial Complexity and Kolmogorov Complexity

• Published in: Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design Vol. 12693; pp. 147 - 160
• Main Author: Javaheri Javid, Mohammad Ali
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2021; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Cellular automata; Computational aesthetics; Information theory; Kolmogorov complexity; Spatial complexity
• ISBN: 9783030729134; 3030729133
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-72914-1_10

This paper addresses the computational notion of aesthetics in the framework of multi-state two-dimensional cellular automata (2D CA). The measure of complexity is a core concept in computational approaches to aesthetics. Shannon’s information theory provided an objective measure of complexity, which led to the emergence of various informational theories of aesthetics. However, entropy fails to take into account the spatial characteristics of 2D patterns; these characteristics are fundamental in addressing the aesthetic problem in general, and of CA-generated patterns in particular. We propose two empirically evaluated alternative measures of complexity, taking into account the spatial characteristics of 2D patterns along with experimental studies on human aesthetic perception in the visual domain. The first model, spatial complexity, is based on the probabilistic spatial distribution of neighbouring cells over the lattice of a multi-state 2D cellular automaton. The second model is based on algorithmic information theory (Kolmogorov complexity) which is extended to estimate the complexity of 2D patterns. The spatial complexity measure presents performance advantage over information-theoretic models enabling more accurate measurement of complexity in relation to aesthetic evaluations of 2D patterns. The results of experimentation demonstrate the presence of correlation between the models and aesthetic judgements of experimental 2D patterns.