No, no, no,I was *joking*! It really is Y2K like? Actually, I remember there were a couple of other Y2K style rollover dates people were warning about, although I can't recall if 2013 was one.

So this is now my 3rd favorite software bug, following:
1) Ariane 5 16 bit speed roll over http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5
2) Mars Climate Orbiter pound-force/newtons fiasco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
 

Aha! Y2K. The time tagging problem is a little worse than presented.

Absolutely. There are many worthy causes: poverty, global warming, drugs, censorship, domestic violence, corruption, election reform, on and on. A worthy cause is just that, worthy. Working on a worthy cause should be applauded, not belittled because it is not worthy enough. In some cases, as presumably this one, the cause is combined with a profit motive. It is still better than profiting off of misery.

Poit!

In my day we had 9600 baud and we were glad to have it! When it made this horrible screeching sound you new it was working. Kids today with their "wifi" and their "smart phones", "Ohhh, this video clip has been buffering for 10 seconds, someone come help me" Bah.

I am the one who is amazed. You've got the next great scifi author or inventor on your hands. The closest my son (age 10) has come to that is tell me about the cool all in one tool he would like to have in minecraft. :)

Actually I my son's views on computer games quite interesting. At his age, I was in the pre-modem era and it was a few years before I encountered my first text adventure game.

The way the dogs interact with robots programmed to interact like human's seems pretty analogous to the way humans interact with robot pets. How do dogs interact with robots that are programmed to act like dogs? Then we can see how the dog-bots interact with robots. Now lets add some cat-bots, mouse-bots and cheese-bots. When you stir this pot I think you end up with a Tom and Jerry cartoon that may already exist.

Copying stroke for stroke is a different thing altogether. There is a whole industry for this. http://www.artsstudio.com/ Price ranges with quality. Genuine paintings done by hand go from $200 to somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000 I think. They are not priceless. There is something about human nature the values the original. The price of art is a pure economic ideal. It is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it, so you can't really argue that someone overpaid.

The high end copies entail using the same techniques and materials which can be quite laborious. Some material are hand made and recreation requires a lot of specialized knowledge practice. Working with the material also takes lots of skill and practice. Glazing techniques, etc take a long time are more that stroke copy. Even if the robot can make the exact marks, the materials will come from someone else,

So if the robot is very good a stroke for stroke copy it would be better than what the low end people are producing. However, making the material and some techniques are probably outside a stroke for stroke copy. So I estimate the value at $500.

As a someone with a Masters of Fine Art in painting, I can tell you there is not a lot of interest relating to art.

First: "Our hypothesis is that painting ... can be seen as optimization processes in which color is manually distributed on a canvas until the painter is able to recognize the content" is off base
All the lines in all the work are all the same length and thickness. Almost no artist simple distributes color. Artist chose details and focus.In this case David is being helped because it is using composed photography to copy.

Second: Even if they could get close to copying human style, it is not that interesting precisely because it is following an algorithm. The idea "the machine might enable new techniques since labor plays no role any more" is pretty weak. Artists typical employ computers to do what a computer does well, not to imitate humans. It is quite possible someone will actually do precisely what the authors suggest and use the machines ability for work without rest. There are always artist who find ways to use tools in new ways or to use them to make commentary on the process. This puts the robot in the same league as a chainsaw for carving wood, or paint that drips down from a rope.

As someone who as worked with machine learning a bit, there is not a huge amount of interest here either.

All in all it was probably fun and interesting to work on, but not all the interesting to read about or watch.