Nvn
You can read on their website [1] what they did, and seems that it involved a lot of manual labour still.
They require you to make an account, but they have tens of thousands of public domain photographs of many of the artworks in their collection.
There might also be a demand for applied statisticians, but that doesn't make AI experts statisticians. I understand the confusion, as the term AI is often misused, but when you see the names mentioned in the article it's clear they're talking about actual AI researchers.
In general, AI borrows many more techniques from mathematics than it does from statistics. However, the field of AI has been quite established since the 1960's, and many techniques have been developed within that field as AI techniques, it's more about being accurate than about being fashionable as AI simply isn't 'just' statistics.
This paper [0] does a pretty good job of giving an explanation for that.
It is a bit silly to call these invariances, as different filter/kernel combinations will be activated when a rotated or scaled input is encountered, the individual filters are not rotation or scale invariant. The entire network can only deal with rotations and scales it encountered during training, whilst having to learn 'redundant features' to a certain extent.
It will get the job done for many tasks, but it's a brute force sort of approach that will complicate the learning process (i.e. more scales and rotations require more filters, thus needing a more complex network that is harder to train).
I think there's definitely a lot that can be learnt from (classical) signal processing in order to come up with a much more elegant and efficient solution.
While the image shows a yellow and black line pattern to us, are you sure this is also what the CNN "sees"? Couldn't this image just be the same as the adversarial images, i.e. it responds to many small input values rather than the overall pattern?
If it's possible to make the CNN predict an ostrich for an image of a car, then the same can be done of an image of an alternating yellow and black line pattern, no?
1. You determine the 'dominant' colours to be the centroids of your clusters. The centroid is the mean of the points within the cluster, this mean is not necessarily a colour that is in your image. If you, for example, take a picture divided into four different solid coloured squares, and use this to find the 3 dominant colours it will average 2 (or more) colours. (The same might happen for more complex images with a a lot of contrast).
2. When randomly initializing k-means there is a good chance you'll find one of the local optima, so running it more than once will return different colours. In general it is good practice to run it several times and choose the outcome with the lowest cost.
3. K-means can take a long time to converge; limit the amount of iterations it can do.
These things aside, very cool usage of k-means on image data!
It also discusses genetic algorithms[2], providing a really simple implementation that suffers from the same problem as the article in question; the outcome you're looking for is already known so the fitness function is rather trivial, but nonetheless its a good place to get started.
[1] http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/
[2] http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/nature-inspired/evolution/ge...
Based on this they picked the 16 best criteria and generated games. The fitness function is a score based on the criteria after n amount of automated playthroughs. These generated games tested by humans and they found that the aesthetics criteria and human judgements correlated significantly.
Besides these criteria (they do not describe all criteria in depth but I assume some might be leaning towards being subjective in regards to the programmers preferences) they also add a restriction to how long the planning of a move for a game can take (15 seconds) and discarding the game if it surpasses this. Which as you say can be seen as designing the search space, but the results indicate that they've come up with a way to effectively measure the "fun" factor of the games they came up with.
[1] http://www.cameronius.com/cv/publications/ciaig-browne-maire...