Beauty and intelligence both live in the same strange place: the edge of chaos.
Where the unexpected emerges.
Here's a diptych of two interesting papers on how the unexpected emerges in art and AI.
🎨Left Panel: "What is Generative Art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory" (Galanter, 2003)
When I first explored generative art with math that generated patterns (think fractals, strange attractors, cellular automata) more than a decade ago, I spent hours tweaking parameters, searching for that perfect combination where beauty emerged.
Too simple - boring. Too chaotic - meaningless. But at certain sweet spots, striking patterns emerge.
Galanter explained that compelling generative art doesn't come from perfect order or pure randomness. Both are simple. Real complexity and real beauty live in between. These exist at the edge of chaos, structured yet surprising.
🌀Right Panel: "Intelligence at the Edge of Chaos" (Zhang et al., 2025)
For anyone who has trained deep learning models, this hunt for the perfect set of parameters (and hyper-parameters) that achieves the best performance is also a familiar one. But we usually just hunt for them in expected ways (e.g., using past chess data to train AI to play chess).
In "Intelligence at the Edge of Chaos", researchers trained AI on patterns generated by the same math I used for generative art. Performance (on entirely separate tasks like chess and reasoning) was highest not with simple patterns, nor with pure randomness, but with data at the "edge of chaos": a sweet spot balancing structure and unpredictability.
The broader pattern.
Perhaps this edge of chaos is where growth happens. Not in safe repetition where nothing changes. Not in pure randomness where nothing connects. But in that dynamic space where unexpected patterns emerge.
That's where artists find beauty. That's where AI finds intelligence. Perhaps that's also where we find growth, or even innovation - at the edge of rules and risks.
What edges are you exploring to grow?
I'd mentioned emergent behavior as a source of one of the three 'U's (unexpectedness) in my Thinking in Risk article.
In these two papers, we saw how it can also lead to unexpected beauty and intelligence.
The patterns below that I generated below are from the aizawa, bedhead, lorenz and rossler strange attractor equations.
#Complexity #Emergence #AI #Unexpectedness
