Artists build on top of science.

Renaissance painters used Cartesian geometry to invent perspective. Nineteenth century photographers' adapted industrial chemistry into the photographic process. Contemporary filmmakers shoot on cutting edge cameras made possible by the latest in sensor miniaturization. Each generation of artists turns the knowledge of their time into new creative tools.

How can we design systems when we don't know what we're doing?

The most exciting engineering challenges lie on the boundary of theory and the unknown. Not so unknown that they're hopeless, but not enough theory to predict the results of our decisions. Systems at this boundary often rely on emergent behavior — high-level effects that arise indirectly from low-level interactions.

When designing at this boundary, the challenge lies not in constructing the system, but in understanding it. In the absence of theory, we must develop an intuition to guide our decisions. The design process is thus one of exploration and discovery.

Mitchell's best-candidate algorithm generates a new random sample by creating k candidate samples, and picking the best of k. Here the "best" sample is defined as the sample that is farthest away from previous samples.