Renowned Oxford professor and science communicator Marcus du Sautoy explores the nature of creativity, highlighting the most important aspects of how algorithms work and the mathematical rules that underlie them. He asks how much of our emotional response to works of art is driven by the brain's response to patterns and structures, and what exactly it means to be creative in mathematics, art, literature and music. Based on vivid examples of how the harmony of world masterpieces is “verified by algebra,” including Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire,” and “Harry Potter”; the musical works of Wagner and Schubert, on the one hand, and the work of Massive Attack, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, on the other, the author finds out how long it will take for machines to learn to create truly creative works and whether they, in turn, can stimulate our imagination . The result is a fascinating and completely unusual exploration of both artificial intelligence and the essence of what it means to be human. “Artificial intelligence is shaking the very foundations of our existence, demonstrating how much of what people do can be done by machines, and even better than them. But this book is less about a future with self-driving cars and computerized medicine than about whether algorithms can compete in any meaningful way with the power of human code. Are computers capable of creativity? What does it take to be creative? To what extent is the emotional response to works of art the result of the brain's response to certain designs and structures? These are some of the topics we will look at." (Marcus du Sautoy)The publishing layout of the book is saved in PDF A4 format.