IELTS CAM Inspired 13 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 13 - Reading Test 1 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Complete the table below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Section of website
Comments
Database of tourism services
• businesses could be added to the directory simply by filling in a
1
• every listed operator was independently checked against a set of national
2
, and its effect on the natural world was taken into account
Special features on local topics
• e.g. a filmed conversation with a retired rugby
3
, and a clickable tour of the
4
where major films had been shot
Information on driving routes
• the driving routes it suggested varied with the kind of
5
a motorist preferred
Travel Planner
• the attractions a user had bookmarked could all be displayed together on a single
6
, along with public-transport details and nearby places to stay
'Your Words'
• travellers were invited to send in an
7
describing their trip
Question 8 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
8
New Zealand earns more from tourism than from any other form of overseas trade.
9
Operators had their directory entries created for them by Tourism New Zealand staff.
10
The website has won more awards than any comparable tourism website.
11
Transport and accommodation together do more to satisfy visitors than the activities they choose.
12
Visitors find cultural experiences more rewarding if they are able to join in rather than simply look on.
13
British visitors stay in New Zealand for longer on average than those from other countries.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
The Reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-viii
List of Headings
I
What schools can do to reduce boredom
II
Sorting boredom into categories
III
Working out who suffers most from boredom
IV
A fresh cause of boredom and a way to respond
V
Why boredom is hard to pin down for researchers
VI
The useful things boredom can produce
VII
Which age groups feel boredom most
VIII
A risk that boredom can bring
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
Question 20 - 23
Look at the following people and the list of ideas below.
Match each person with the correct idea, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E.
List of Findings
A
Attempts to shake off boredom can make its bad effects stronger.
B
Contemporary lifestyles could be generating extra boredom.
C
Feeling bored can lead a person to stay away from something bad for them.
D
Boredom could grow rarer in the years ahead.
E
Some kinds of boredom do more harm than the rest.
20
Anneli Virtanen
21
Lukas Brandt
22
Daniel Voss
23
Mira Lindqvist
Question 24 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Dealing with boredom
In Daniel Voss's account, what chiefly marks out boredom is that sufferers are unable to , which he traces to a breakdown in the 'attention system', leaving them frustrated and irritable. According to his team, individuals who make the chasing of their main goal in life are likely to find boredom hard to handle, while those blessed with a degree of tend to manage it without much trouble.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the first paragraph, the writer emphasises that computer-generated work
A
has advanced considerably already.
B
is received very differently by different people.
C
has fared better in certain art forms than in others.
D
is less remarkable than most people assume.
28
According to Anneke Vos, people find computer art troubling because
A
it could eventually replace art made by humans.
B
it is artistically weaker than human work.
C
it may cause human skills to decline.
D
it removes something essential to being human.
29
One important way in which The Muse Machine differs from Cleo concerns
A
how its output is judged technically.
B
where its subject matter comes from.
C
the training of the person who built it.
D
the way the public reacts to its work.
30
In the fourth paragraph, the point Tomas Herrera makes is that
A
art produced by software is frequently written off as naive.
B
a machine cannot fairly be expected to match human imagination.
C
people judge machine art and human art by different standards.
D
the notion of creativity should differ across art forms.
31
The writer mentions the pictures of a chair as an instance of computer art that
A
displays real artistic ability.
B
resembles the work of a famous painter.
C
produces an unusually powerful impression.
D
reveals the software's technical shortcomings.
Question 32 - 37
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-G from the box below.
List of Endings
A
being aware of whether humans or machines had made it.
B
making work that still depended entirely on its creator's imagination.
C
explaining the technical workings of his software.
D
creating pieces that could barely be told apart from human work.
E
learning that a computer program had produced it.
F
weighing what humans and machines have each achieved artistically.
G
convincing the general public to value computer art.
Tomas Herrera believes that a sound assessment depends on adopting a long-term perspective and
32
The AHS software built by Reuben Farrow astonished people by
33
Anneke Vos found fault with Farrow for not
34
Pieter Zalewski argued that AHS was doing nothing more than
35
Listeners who had enjoyed AHS's music grew angry upon
36
Those taking part in Ronan Deveraux's study had to judge the pieces without
37
Question 38 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In following statements below, choose
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
38
Deveraux's participants were aware, before the study started, of which pieces a computer had created.
39
Even the expert musicians in the study showed the same reluctance towards pieces they believed a computer had produced.
40
Since it began taking inspiration from online communities, The Muse Machine's work has grown more popular with the public.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Case Study: Tourism New Zealand website
Home to roughly four million people and a long-haul flight from every one of the world's principal tourist-generating markets, New Zealand is a small nation for which drawing in overseas visitors has never been straightforward. Tourism today supplies about nine percent of national output and earns more from abroad than any other industry. It runs in the opposite direction to the country's other export trades: where those make goods to sell overseas, tourism carries its customers into New Zealand. What is on offer is the place itself – its scenery, its inhabitants and the things a traveller can do there. The campaign Tourism New Zealand launched in 1999 to project a fresh brand identity abroad rested on three ideas: breathtaking landscapes, exhilarating outdoor pursuits and a living Maori heritage. It lifted New Zealand into the ranks of the most powerful national brands anywhere.
Anchoring that campaign was a website, www.newzealand.com, intended to act as a single doorway to everything a would-be visitor might be after. At its core sat a directory of tourism operators, taking in firms based within New Zealand as well as overseas agencies that sold trips to it. Getting onto the list demanded very little: a business had only to complete a short form, so that even the tiniest guesthouse or the most specialised activity provider could win a web presence and reach an audience on the far side of the world. And because every operator could log in and amend its own entry whenever it chose, what visitors saw stayed dependable and current. Quality, meanwhile, was safeguarded through a separate arrangement: each organisation displayed on the site was independently judged against an agreed set of national standards, and one strand of that assessment weighed the mark a business left on the natural world.
The site carried features on well-known people and places too, so as to convey something of what a New Zealand trip actually felt like. Among the best liked was a recorded interview with a retired national rugby coach; another that pulled in heavy traffic was an interactive tour of the locations that overseas film-makers had picked out for their productions. Tools for independent travellers wanting to shape trips of their own were added as the site matured. Planning a driving holiday was made simpler by a catalogue of the country's best-loved road journeys, which put forward different ones depending on the terrain a motorist favoured and set out the distances and times each involved.
A Travel Planner tool came along afterwards. It let users click to 'bookmark' whichever places or attractions caught their eye, then see the lot laid out on a map. For any cluster of chosen spots, the planner proposed possible routes and spelt out the public-transport links running between them, together with connections to somewhere to stay close by. By registering, a user could keep a Travel Plan to return to later, or print it off to carry along on the trip. The site also ran a 'Your Words' area, where anybody who wished was free to send in an account of their New Zealand journey for possible publication on its pages.
For its online achievement and innovation the Tourism New Zealand website collected two awards, though the more revealing yardstick was arguably the jump in visitor numbers. Across the years from 1999 to 2004, total spending by tourists rose by an average approaching seven percent annually. Arrivals from Britain climbed faster again, at something like thirteen percent a year between 2002 and 2006, while British travel abroad taken as a whole grew by a mere four percent over that stretch.
The site was designed so that individuals and travel companies alike could assemble itineraries and packages to fit their own tastes. Crucially, it let visitors hunt for things to do not only by where they were, but by the specific character of the activity – a telling point, since studies show activities matter more than anything to how content a visitor feels, supplying seventy-four percent of that satisfaction, while transport and accommodation make up the remaining twenty-six percent. As a rule, the more activities a visitor takes on, the more contented they become. Travellers also get the most out of cultural activities when these are hands-on – dropping in at a marae, say, to discover how Maori life was traditionally led. Many long-haul travellers prize this kind of learning, taking away tales for friends and family back home. Those coming to New Zealand also seem reluctant to feel like one of a crowd, treating activities shared with only a few others as more meaningful.
New Zealand, one might argue, is hardly a run-of-the-mill destination. Small in size, its visitor economy leans for the most part on small businesses, and the country is widely taken to be a safe, English-speaking place served by a reliable transport network. Given the length of the flight, the majority of visitors linger a while – about twenty days on average – and aim to see as much of the country as they can on what usually feels like a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Yet the deeper lessons carry across anywhere: the worth of a strong brand, of a strategy built on experiences available nowhere else, and of a thorough, easy-to-use website.
This most ordinary of feelings is proving far richer than anyone had expected
A
A. Everyone recognises the sensation: your thoughts refuse to settle, the minutes seem to drag, and nothing on offer looks likely to lift your mood. Pinning the feeling down precisely enough to examine it in a laboratory, however, has turned out to be surprisingly awkward. Part of the trouble is that boredom shades into so many neighbouring states — irritation, listlessness, gloom and plain indifference among them. Researchers cannot even agree on whether it is invariably a dull, low-energy condition, or whether the jittery, can't-sit-still version deserves the same name. Anneli Virtanen, a psychologist at the University of Tampere in Finland, likens it in her book The Restless Mind to nausea — a response whose task is to keep us clear of particular circumstances. 'Where nausea steers us away from food that might poison us,' she writes, 'boredom may steer us away from company and settings that offer us nothing.'
B
Working from interviews about how people actually experience being bored, Lukas Brandt and his colleagues at the University of Graz in Austria have lately mapped out five separate varieties, which they label vacant, drifting, seeking, agitated and resigned. Each can be located on a simple grid: one axis stretches from low to high arousal, the other from pleasant to unpleasant feeling. What Brandt finds striking is that, although most of us pass through every variety at one time or another, we each tend to lean heavily towards a single one. The version to be most wary of is the agitated kind, in which high arousal collides with thoroughly negative feeling. The kindest is the vacant sort, where a person, though absorbed in nothing rewarding, stays calm and untroubled. Whether particular personalities are drawn towards particular types of boredom is a question that has yet to be settled.
C
Rosa Feldmann, a psychologist at Ghent University in Belgium, takes the case still further. Every emotion, she maintains, exists for some purpose, and boredom is no exception. Her own work suggests that a bored mind is a more inventive one. 'People dread boredom,' she notes, 'yet it can be the doorway to all sorts of remarkable ideas.' In a study she published last year, volunteers who had first been made thoroughly bored — by spending a quarter of an hour transcribing entries from a dictionary — went on to devise far more imaginative uses for an ordinary plastic spoon than a comparison group did. A dull, undemanding task suits creativity precisely because it lets the mind roam, Feldmann argues; indeed, she recommends that we deliberately build more boredom into our days.
D
Not everyone is persuaded. Daniel Voss, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, objects that once your mind is wandering freely, you are no longer bored — to his thinking, boredom is by definition a state we do not want. This is not to deny that it may be adaptive. Physical pain is adaptive too, he points out: without it we would come to serious harm, yet no one would argue that we should go looking for pain, and boredom, however useful evolution has made it, can turn poisonous when left to fester. What lies at the very heart of boredom, for Voss, is the mind's failure to shift its 'attention system' into gear, and the result is an inability to concentrate on anything at all, so that time appears to crawl. Worse still, the harder you struggle to put things right, the more wretched you may feel. 'People reach out to the world, and when they fail to connect, the frustration and irritation set in,' he says. Most troubling of all, in Voss's view, is that a repeated failure to marshal one's attention can tip a person into a state of no longer knowing what to do — and no longer caring.
E
Why the attention system should break down in the first place is what Voss's group is now investigating. The research is at an early stage, but they suspect that personality accounts for at least part of it. A proneness to boredom has been tied to a range of traits. Those whose behaviour is driven chiefly by the pursuit of reward appear to suffer worst of all, whereas a quality such as inquisitiveness seems to lift a person's threshold for it. Further signs that boredom does real damage come from comparing people who are easily bored with those who are not: the former tend to fare worse in their schooling, their working lives and their fortunes generally. Boredom, admittedly, does not kill anyone directly — the danger lies in what we do to relieve it. So how might it be eased before matters reach that point? Brandt's team offers one answer. In work with adolescents, they found that youngsters who 'approach' a tedious situation — recognising it as dull and throwing themselves into it regardless — reported less boredom than those who reached instead for snacks, television or their social-media feeds.
F
There may even be a fresh source of boredom in the way we now live, suggests the psychologist Mira Lindqvist. 'Modern life bombards us with stimulation, and yet people still struggle to find meaning in it,' she observes. The remedy she proposes is not more mental stimulation but less: rather than reaching once more for our phones, we might let boredom do its work and prompt us to engage with the world around us in some more meaningful fashion.
Among the swelling ranks of computer programs said by their creators to possess a creative gift is The Muse Machine. Concerts of classical music written by a machine, not a person, have left listeners spellbound, some convinced a human hand lay behind the notes. Canvases produced by a robot have fetched thousands of dollars and found their way onto the walls of respected galleries. Programs have even been written that turn out art their own programmers could never have pictured.
No other species carries out complex creative work as a matter of routine, the way people do. Should that activity prove reducible to lines of code, what then becomes of human creativity? Anneke Vos, who researches computational creativity at the Institute for Digital Arts in Rotterdam, calls it a question that goes to the very heart of what we are. As she puts it, the prospect unsettles many: they fear it strips away something they had thought belonged to humans alone.
Computer-made art is, in some measure, something we have all encountered. Where, though, does the artist's contribution end and the machine's own inventiveness start? Take Cleo, among the earliest of the machine artists, a robot whose paintings have hung in Berlin's Neue Halle and the Toronto Gallery of Modern Art. Left to itself, Cleo can take up a brush and apply paint to canvas. That is striking, no doubt, yet the robot remains essentially an instrument for realising ideas that originate with its programmer.
Tomas Herrera, who created The Muse Machine, is determined that his program should escape that very charge. Where older artists like Cleo depended on heavy guidance, his system needs only the barest instruction and comes up with its own themes by searching the internet, running web queries and combing through social media. Lately it has started to show something like imagination as well, inventing images from nothing. Among its earliest independent pieces is a set of hazy landscapes of trees and sky. A mechanical quality is what some viewers see in them, but Herrera blames the differing yardsticks people apply depending on whether a person or machine produced the work. Remember, he notes, that no photograph guided the program as it painted those scenes. We happily credit a child with some imagination when it paints a scene straight from its head, he observes, and a machine deserves the same. Flaws in the code, too, can throw up surprises. A glitch once left several of the program's pictures of a chair rendered only in black and white, lending them an unsettling, spectral air. If a revered painter like Margit Rauch is praised for working within a narrow range of colours, why hold a computer to a different standard?
For researchers of Herrera's persuasion, it makes little sense to judge a machine's creativity against that of humans, who have had thousands of years to hone what we do. Others, however, are gripped by the idea that a computer could one day produce work as inventive and nuanced as that of our finest artists. To date just a single project has approached that mark. The composer Reuben Farrow built a program he named the Algorithmic Harmony System, or AHS. AHS could compose not merely in Farrow's own manner but in that of the era's most venerated composers too, among them Valberg, Dupre and Santing. Listeners wept, and on occasion specialists in classical music were taken in, certain they were listening to a genuine Dupre. The reception was not universally warm, though. Vos, for one, dismissed Farrow's project as pseudoscience and took him to task for being wilfully obscure about how the thing actually functioned. Pieter Zalewski of Ashcroft University held that AHS merely produced imitations still wholly beholden to the original composer's creative spark. Audiences, on learning how the music had come about, often rounded on Farrow; one admirer even tried to punch him. In the thick of the uproar, Farrow wiped out the databases on which AHS depended.
So what explains a public that adored the music and then drew back once its origins came to light? A clue emerges from research by Ronan Deveraux, a computer scientist at Kilbrannan University. He had a panel of trained musicians and ordinary listeners alike evaluate six pieces. Nobody was told in advance which works came from people and which from machines; instead each listener had to guess the source and then say how much the piece appealed to them. Where a listener took the composer to be a machine, their liking for the piece generally fell below that of listeners who assumed a human author. Even the trained musicians followed this pattern, though one might have supposed their judgements would be the more impartial.
And where does such bias originate? Adrian Voss of Halloway University offers one account: some of the enjoyment art brings us, he suggests, flows from our awareness of the creative process that produced it, a quality he calls its irresistible essence. In a related vein, studies by Elena Sorokin of Meridian University have found that the more time and labour people believe a work demanded, the more they enjoy it. Herrera makes a comparable point: faced with a work of art, viewers puzzle over what was in the artist's mind, or what message is being sent. When a machine is the maker, that line of wondering has nowhere to go, and so, it would seem, nothing invites exploration. Yet as the technology grows more intricate, it may become possible to locate those deeper layers in machine-made art after all. That is exactly why Herrera has The Muse Machine draw on online social networks for its cues: the hope is that it will settle on subjects that already carry meaning for us.
Home to roughly four million people and a long-haul flight from every one of the world's principal tourist-generating markets, New Zealand is a small nation for which drawing in overseas visitors has never been straightforward. Tourism today supplies about nine percent of national output and earns more from abroad than any other industry. It runs in the opposite direction to the country's other export trades: where those make goods to sell overseas, tourism carries its customers into New Zealand. What is on offer is the place itself – its scenery, its inhabitants and the things a traveller can do there. The campaign Tourism New Zealand launched in 1999 to project a fresh brand identity abroad rested on three ideas: breathtaking landscapes, exhilarating outdoor pursuits and a living Maori heritage. It lifted New Zealand into the ranks of the most powerful national brands anywhere.
Anchoring that campaign was a website, www.newzealand.com, intended to act as a single doorway to everything a would-be visitor might be after. At its core sat a directory of tourism operators, taking in firms based within New Zealand as well as overseas agencies that sold trips to it. Getting onto the list demanded very little: a business had only to complete a short form, so that even the tiniest guesthouse or the most specialised activity provider could win a web presence and reach an audience on the far side of the world. And because every operator could log in and amend its own entry whenever it chose, what visitors saw stayed dependable and current. Quality, meanwhile, was safeguarded through a separate arrangement: each organisation displayed on the site was independently judged against an agreed set of national standards, and one strand of that assessment weighed the mark a business left on the natural world.
The site carried features on well-known people and places too, so as to convey something of what a New Zealand trip actually felt like. Among the best liked was a recorded interview with a retired national rugby coach; another that pulled in heavy traffic was an interactive tour of the locations that overseas film-makers had picked out for their productions. Tools for independent travellers wanting to shape trips of their own were added as the site matured. Planning a driving holiday was made simpler by a catalogue of the country's best-loved road journeys, which put forward different ones depending on the terrain a motorist favoured and set out the distances and times each involved.
A Travel Planner tool came along afterwards. It let users click to 'bookmark' whichever places or attractions caught their eye, then see the lot laid out on a map. For any cluster of chosen spots, the planner proposed possible routes and spelt out the public-transport links running between them, together with connections to somewhere to stay close by. By registering, a user could keep a Travel Plan to return to later, or print it off to carry along on the trip. The site also ran a 'Your Words' area, where anybody who wished was free to send in an account of their New Zealand journey for possible publication on its pages.
For its online achievement and innovation the Tourism New Zealand website collected two awards, though the more revealing yardstick was arguably the jump in visitor numbers. Across the years from 1999 to 2004, total spending by tourists rose by an average approaching seven percent annually. Arrivals from Britain climbed faster again, at something like thirteen percent a year between 2002 and 2006, while British travel abroad taken as a whole grew by a mere four percent over that stretch.
The site was designed so that individuals and travel companies alike could assemble itineraries and packages to fit their own tastes. Crucially, it let visitors hunt for things to do not only by where they were, but by the specific character of the activity – a telling point, since studies show activities matter more than anything to how content a visitor feels, supplying seventy-four percent of that satisfaction, while transport and accommodation make up the remaining twenty-six percent. As a rule, the more activities a visitor takes on, the more contented they become. Travellers also get the most out of cultural activities when these are hands-on – dropping in at a marae, say, to discover how Maori life was traditionally led. Many long-haul travellers prize this kind of learning, taking away tales for friends and family back home. Those coming to New Zealand also seem reluctant to feel like one of a crowd, treating activities shared with only a few others as more meaningful.
New Zealand, one might argue, is hardly a run-of-the-mill destination. Small in size, its visitor economy leans for the most part on small businesses, and the country is widely taken to be a safe, English-speaking place served by a reliable transport network. Given the length of the flight, the majority of visitors linger a while – about twenty days on average – and aim to see as much of the country as they can on what usually feels like a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Yet the deeper lessons carry across anywhere: the worth of a strong brand, of a strategy built on experiences available nowhere else, and of a thorough, easy-to-use website.
B. Working from interviews about how people actually experience being bored, Lukas Brandt and his colleagues at the University of Graz in Austria have lately mapped out five separate varieties, which they label vacant, drifting, seeking, agitated and resigned. Each can be located on a simple grid: one axis stretches from low to high arousal, the other from pleasant to unpleasant feeling. What Brandt finds striking is that, although most of us pass through every variety at one time or another, we each tend to lean heavily towards a single one. The version to be most wary of is the agitated kind, in which high arousal collides with thoroughly negative feeling. The kindest is the vacant sort, where a person, though absorbed in nothing rewarding, stays calm and untroubled. Whether particular personalities are drawn towards particular types of boredom is a question that has yet to be settled.
C. Rosa Feldmann, a psychologist at Ghent University in Belgium, takes the case still further. Every emotion, she maintains, exists for some purpose, and boredom is no exception. Her own work suggests that a bored mind is a more inventive one. 'People dread boredom,' she notes, 'yet it can be the doorway to all sorts of remarkable ideas.' In a study she published last year, volunteers who had first been made thoroughly bored — by spending a quarter of an hour transcribing entries from a dictionary — went on to devise far more imaginative uses for an ordinary plastic spoon than a comparison group did. A dull, undemanding task suits creativity precisely because it lets the mind roam, Feldmann argues; indeed, she recommends that we deliberately build more boredom into our days.
D. Not everyone is persuaded. Daniel Voss, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, objects that once your mind is wandering freely, you are no longer bored — to his thinking, boredom is by definition a state we do not want. This is not to deny that it may be adaptive. Physical pain is adaptive too, he points out: without it we would come to serious harm, yet no one would argue that we should go looking for pain, and boredom, however useful evolution has made it, can turn poisonous when left to fester. What lies at the very heart of boredom, for Voss, is the mind's failure to shift its 'attention system' into gear, and the result is an inability to concentrate on anything at all, so that time appears to crawl. Worse still, the harder you struggle to put things right, the more wretched you may feel. 'People reach out to the world, and when they fail to connect, the frustration and irritation set in,' he says. Most troubling of all, in Voss's view, is that a repeated failure to marshal one's attention can tip a person into a state of no longer knowing what to do — and no longer caring.
E. Why the attention system should break down in the first place is what Voss's group is now investigating. The research is at an early stage, but they suspect that personality accounts for at least part of it. A proneness to boredom has been tied to a range of traits. Those whose behaviour is driven chiefly by the pursuit of reward appear to suffer worst of all, whereas a quality such as inquisitiveness seems to lift a person's threshold for it. Further signs that boredom does real damage come from comparing people who are easily bored with those who are not: the former tend to fare worse in their schooling, their working lives and their fortunes generally. Boredom, admittedly, does not kill anyone directly — the danger lies in what we do to relieve it. So how might it be eased before matters reach that point? Brandt's team offers one answer. In work with adolescents, they found that youngsters who 'approach' a tedious situation — recognising it as dull and throwing themselves into it regardless — reported less boredom than those who reached instead for snacks, television or their social-media feeds.
F. There may even be a fresh source of boredom in the way we now live, suggests the psychologist Mira Lindqvist. 'Modern life bombards us with stimulation, and yet people still struggle to find meaning in it,' she observes. The remedy she proposes is not more mental stimulation but less: rather than reaching once more for our phones, we might let boredom do its work and prompt us to engage with the world around us in some more meaningful fashion.
Among the swelling ranks of computer programs said by their creators to possess a creative gift is The Muse Machine. Concerts of classical music written by a machine, not a person, have left listeners spellbound, some convinced a human hand lay behind the notes. Canvases produced by a robot have fetched thousands of dollars and found their way onto the walls of respected galleries. Programs have even been written that turn out art their own programmers could never have pictured.
No other species carries out complex creative work as a matter of routine, the way people do. Should that activity prove reducible to lines of code, what then becomes of human creativity? Anneke Vos, who researches computational creativity at the Institute for Digital Arts in Rotterdam, calls it a question that goes to the very heart of what we are. As she puts it, the prospect unsettles many: they fear it strips away something they had thought belonged to humans alone.
Computer-made art is, in some measure, something we have all encountered. Where, though, does the artist's contribution end and the machine's own inventiveness start? Take Cleo, among the earliest of the machine artists, a robot whose paintings have hung in Berlin's Neue Halle and the Toronto Gallery of Modern Art. Left to itself, Cleo can take up a brush and apply paint to canvas. That is striking, no doubt, yet the robot remains essentially an instrument for realising ideas that originate with its programmer.
Tomas Herrera, who created The Muse Machine, is determined that his program should escape that very charge. Where older artists like Cleo depended on heavy guidance, his system needs only the barest instruction and comes up with its own themes by searching the internet, running web queries and combing through social media. Lately it has started to show something like imagination as well, inventing images from nothing. Among its earliest independent pieces is a set of hazy landscapes of trees and sky. A mechanical quality is what some viewers see in them, but Herrera blames the differing yardsticks people apply depending on whether a person or machine produced the work. Remember, he notes, that no photograph guided the program as it painted those scenes. We happily credit a child with some imagination when it paints a scene straight from its head, he observes, and a machine deserves the same. Flaws in the code, too, can throw up surprises. A glitch once left several of the program's pictures of a chair rendered only in black and white, lending them an unsettling, spectral air. If a revered painter like Margit Rauch is praised for working within a narrow range of colours, why hold a computer to a different standard?
For researchers of Herrera's persuasion, it makes little sense to judge a machine's creativity against that of humans, who have had thousands of years to hone what we do. Others, however, are gripped by the idea that a computer could one day produce work as inventive and nuanced as that of our finest artists. To date just a single project has approached that mark. The composer Reuben Farrow built a program he named the Algorithmic Harmony System, or AHS. AHS could compose not merely in Farrow's own manner but in that of the era's most venerated composers too, among them Valberg, Dupre and Santing. Listeners wept, and on occasion specialists in classical music were taken in, certain they were listening to a genuine Dupre. The reception was not universally warm, though. Vos, for one, dismissed Farrow's project as pseudoscience and took him to task for being wilfully obscure about how the thing actually functioned. Pieter Zalewski of Ashcroft University held that AHS merely produced imitations still wholly beholden to the original composer's creative spark. Audiences, on learning how the music had come about, often rounded on Farrow; one admirer even tried to punch him. In the thick of the uproar, Farrow wiped out the databases on which AHS depended.
So what explains a public that adored the music and then drew back once its origins came to light? A clue emerges from research by Ronan Deveraux, a computer scientist at Kilbrannan University. He had a panel of trained musicians and ordinary listeners alike evaluate six pieces. Nobody was told in advance which works came from people and which from machines; instead each listener had to guess the source and then say how much the piece appealed to them. Where a listener took the composer to be a machine, their liking for the piece generally fell below that of listeners who assumed a human author. Even the trained musicians followed this pattern, though one might have supposed their judgements would be the more impartial.
And where does such bias originate? Adrian Voss of Halloway University offers one account: some of the enjoyment art brings us, he suggests, flows from our awareness of the creative process that produced it, a quality he calls its irresistible essence. In a related vein, studies by Elena Sorokin of Meridian University have found that the more time and labour people believe a work demanded, the more they enjoy it. Herrera makes a comparable point: faced with a work of art, viewers puzzle over what was in the artist's mind, or what message is being sent. When a machine is the maker, that line of wondering has nowhere to go, and so, it would seem, nothing invites exploration. Yet as the technology grows more intricate, it may become possible to locate those deeper layers in machine-made art after all. That is exactly why Herrera has The Muse Machine draw on online social networks for its cues: the hope is that it will settle on subjects that already carry meaning for us.
