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Imagine a world where anyone can paint a masterpiece with the push of a button, where the barriers between artists and audiences dissolve into the digital ether, and where the very essence of creativity is redefined by artificial intelligence. Sounds like science fiction? Welcome to the new frontier of art in the Intelligence Age.

“Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems.”

Claude Shannon, known as the “father of information theory” and the “father of the Information Age,” was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and cryptographer. In 1948, he laid the mathematical foundations of “information theory.” Eight years later, he cautioned against the overuse of his theory in an article titled “The Bandwagon.” (1) (1) fermatslibrary.com/s/the-bandwagon

The title of this article might suggest a discussion about art or traditional software engineering. However, my focus is on neither and both, it is on what I see as the intersection. I want to reflect on my experiences in refactoring and reusing codebases developed by researchers. It was a journey with lots of ups and downs, but in the end, I have learned something that I want to share.

“Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I came upon the book during my school years. A double-edged sword it was, I’d say. Reading young flings open the door to a universe of thought and understanding, broadening horizons with an uncanny charm. Yet, it also acts as a dampener, limiting the depth of understanding. The juvenile mind, not yet polished by life’s trials and tribulations, can’t fully appreciate the narrative’s intricacies. The outlook of a high-schooler, although rich with enthusiasm, often falls short in depth and breadth.

“Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.” – Marquis de Lafayette

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette (I had to copy this from Wikipedia), or simply Lafayette as is known in the States, was a French aristocrat, a military officer, and revolutionary who played a pivotal role in the American Revolutionary War. As an immigrant, he ended up commanding the Continental Army troops in the siege of Yorktown in 1781, which turned the tide of the war in favor of the American colonies.

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” – Alan Turing

Alan Turing conceived the idea of the Universal Machine in 1936 when he was 24 years old. His Wikipedia page introduces him as an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. The foundation he laid then inspired a small group of highly motivated and brilliant individuals led by John Von Neumann. With only five kilobytes of memory available, they developed unmatched meteorological predictions and tackled problems from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.