Killing me softly with this song :)

That's very cool: DARPA is sponsoring a research on the intelligent software that can play jazz. The article explains the reason for that, but to me it looks more like a smart PR move to attract public attention. The computer writing stories would sound much more feasible, because it involves tracking several characters, their motivations, events, consequences, predicting responses etc. And the application, aside military purposes, could be quite fancy as well (and lucrative!): making an engine to control NPCs in RPGs and create new quests/substory plots. Many companies have claimed that they have a special engine for this, but in reality the implementation is usually very heavily scripted without much improvization.

Or it could be computer that draws pictures, which also requires improvization. HyperNEAT can do that :) And its predecessor was even used in a simulation computer game to command shooting bots.

One more book

It is amazing how many great things we can find on the Internet. About 15 years ago learning a complicated topic would be quite challenging mostly because the amount of information was not that big and the learning at times resembled solving puzzle with most parts missing.

These days it is still challenging (human factor, heh), however the information is all around us, and now arguably a greater problem is to find the time to stop searching & collecting and start reading / programming.

In a meantime, here is an officially freely available book/technical report from very good researchers:

Deng L, Yu D (2014) DEEP LEARNING: Methods and Applications. MSR-TR-2014-21. NOW Publishers.