Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

Post by Lewton » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 11:16 AM UTC

goto11 wrote: post #98

Intermernet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely satire, but it's satire in the face of comical law. That's the point. If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale, and in a limited number of bars, then this is a completely valid argument against such a weak argument. The reality is that many number one songs can be tonally compared to many classical pieces, or even pieces from the last 40 years.…

So I can write a program which can generate your name and your sexual preference (among a lot of garbage data). Does that mean this can no longer be considered private information subject to privacy laws? You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.

Post by fphhotchips » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 11:17 AM UTC

goto11 wrote: post #98

Intermernet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely satire, but it's satire in the face of comical law. That's the point. If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale, and in a limited number of bars, then this is a completely valid argument against such a weak argument. The reality is that many number one songs can be tonally compared to many classical pieces, or even pieces from the last 40 years.…

So I can write a program which can generate your name and your sexual preference (among a lot of garbage data). Does that mean this can no longer be considered private information subject to privacy laws? You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91

albertzeyer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code actually can produce every possible melody in MIDI. They simply have not stored every possible melody explicitly (uncompressed) on a hard drive (which is impossible, as the size is infinity). However, if you interpret the program itself as a self-extracting compressed archive, they actually have stored every possible melody (in a compressed way). So the question reduces to how much the type of compression ma…

> So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here It doesn't matter at all. As 'patio11 correctly points elsewhere in the thread[0], this question boils down to the colour of the bits. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441118

Post by maxerickson » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

phonebucket wrote: post #75

vbezhenar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can trivially write a program which will enumerate all the possible byte sequences in the universe. So you can claim that this tiny program contains everything including god. So you can claim copyright for everything.

> You can trivially write a program which will enumerate all the possible byte sequences in the universe. So you can claim that this tiny program contains everything... Not to get too far off topic, but even an infinitely long byte sequence cannot represent all numbers. It's possible to construct something not representable by that sequence via Cantor's diagonal argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diag…

Post by jagged-chisel » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 11:34 AM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #61

albertzeyer wrote: post #36

The code is written in Rust. The core algorithm can be found here: https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli/blob/master/src/ut... (Specifically the function gen_sequences. It basically uses multi_cartesian_product to iterate over all permutations.) Isn't it a bit of wasted space to store the generated data on archive.org ( https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets )? I mean, as we see, it's trivial to cre…

You can trivially write a program which will enumerate all the possible byte sequences in the universe. So you can claim that this tiny program contains everything including god. So you can claim copyright for everything.