Comment by gwern
2 years ago
I read that a while ago and thought that it was interesting: Hofstadter was right that it would require much more general approaches than Knuth's approach of 'think very hard and tweak a hand-engineered knob', because that's how all the past VAE/GAN/RNN work on typography-related stuff has worked.
As for the broader question of whether such approaches are general AI, well, that's a bullet Hofstadter is increasingly willing to bite, as upset as it makes him: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-ho...
Hofstadter's article is very interesting and delightful (as is typical of him). But as a response to Knuth's article it's basically reacting to a straw-man or misunderstanding: by "a metafont" in "The Concept of a Meta-Font"[1] Knuth simply meant a common description of many related fonts in a family (like the Computer Modern family where different font sizes, bold, italics, sans-serif, typewriter style etc are all generated from common code and tweakable knobs) — this is a consciously chosen and designed family. But when he joked about
> The idea of a meta-font should now be clear. But what good is it? The ability to manipulate lots of parameters may be interesting and fun, but does anybody really need a 6⅐-point font that is one fourth of the way between Baskerville and Helvetica?
Hofstadter ran with it, imagining Knuth to mean a single universal "metafont" from which every single font can be achieved by suitable tweaking of knobs. This is of course nonsense.
Knuth wrote a (little-known or referenced) short response in the same journal's Vol. 17 No. 4 (1983): Volume 17.4 (p 412, or in the PDF page 89 of 96 at https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/issue/view/364/183) [from the tone I imagine him very annoyed :-)]:
> I never meant to imply that all typefaces could usefully be combined into one single meta-font, not even if consideration is restricted to book faces. For example, […] Meanwhile, I'm pleased to see that my article has stimulated people to have other ideas, even if those ideas have little or no connection with the main point I was trying to make. Misunderstandings of meta-fonts may well prove to be more important than my own simple observations in the long run.
Returning to the thread a bit, all these “write code to draw an image” systems—like Metafont/MetaPost, Asymptote, TikZ (and also I guess DOT/Graphviz, Mermaid, nomnoml, …)—are IMO interesting as a way for those who think in language / symbols / concepts to do visual stuff (and vice-versa to some extent), and also (along Knuth's lines) “truly understand” shapes by translating them into precise descriptions. Metafont was never going to become popular expecting font designers to write code (and the fact that hand-writing SVG is a negligible fraction of usage makes sense), but now that LLMs can help translate back-and-forth, it's going to be interesting to see if we ever get to “understanding” shapes.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220629082019/https://s3-us-wes... / https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/5329/4193