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Science and Technology
科技
Art criticism and computers
艺术评论和计算机
Painting by numbers
数字图画
Digital analysis is invading the world of the connoisseur
数字分析正侵蚀艺术品鉴赏界
JUDGING artistic styles, and the similarities between them, might be thought one bastion of human skill that machines could never storm.
对艺术风格，跟他们之间的相似之处的评价，可能被认为是一块机器无法侵犯的人类技艺圣地。
Not so, if Lior Shamir at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan is correct.
并非如此，加入密歇根州老孙死理工大学的Lior Shamir没错的话。
A paper he has just published in Leonardo suggests that computers may have just as good an eye for style as humans do-and, in some cases, may see connections between artists that human critics have missed.
他刚刚在李奥纳多发表的一篇文章之处电脑的眼力可能不必人类差——而且，某些情况下，电脑甚至能够发现一些评论家忽略的，艺术家之间的相似之处。
Dr Shamir, a computer scientist, presented 57 images by each of nine painters-Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh-to a computer, to see what it made of them.
Shamir博士，一位计算机专家，将Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko和 Vincent van Gogh九位画家的每人57幅作品扫描到计算机中，看看它能得出什么。
The computer broke the images into a number of so-called numerical descriptors.
于是电脑将图像分解为许多所谓的数字描述符。
These descriptors quantified textures and colours, the statistical distribution of edges across a canvas, the distributions of particular types of shape, the intensity of the colour of individual points on a painting, and also the nature of any fractal-like patterns within it (fractals are features that reproduce similar shapes at different scales; the edges of snowflakes, for example).
这些解析符将质地和颜色量化，帆布的边缘的统计分布，特定种类的形状的分布，一幅作品上独立的点的颜色的深浅，还有任何蕾丝不规则碎片的本质，不规则碎片是指大小不同形状相似的特质，比如雪花的边缘。
All told, the computer identified 4,027 different numerical descriptors.
结果，电脑总共确认了4027种不同的解析符。
Once their values had been established for each of the 513 artworks that had been fed into it, it was ready to do the analysis.
一旦它们对于这513件被反哺给电脑的每件艺术品的价值被确立，计算机马上可以开始分析。
Dr Shamir's aim was to look for quantifiable ways of distinguishing between the work of different artists.
Shamir博士的目的事项寻找区分不同艺术家作品的可量化的方法。
If such things could be established, it might make the task of deciding who painted what a little easier.
如果上述事实能够被证实成立，区分各个画家的作品的工作将会简单一点儿。
Such decisions matter because, even excluding deliberate forgeries, there are many paintings in existence that cannot conclusively be attributed to a master rather than his pupils, or that may be honestly made copies whose provenance is now lost.
这样的决定对我们很重要，因为即使是在排除有意伪造之后，任然有许多作品不能被确认出自某位画家，而非他的学生，或是某个出处无可探寻的逼真的复制品。
To look for such distinguishing features, Dr Shamir programmed the computer to use a statistical method that scores the strength of the distance between the values of two or more descriptors for each pair of artists.
为了寻找这种能有助于区分的特质，Shamir博士设法使计算机能利用一个统计学方法来评价用来比较每两位画家的两个以上的描述符的价值之间距离的大小。
As a result, he was able to rank each of the 4,027 descriptors by how useful it was at discriminating between artists.
最后，他就能根据描述符分辨艺术家的能力来给它们打分。
Surprisingly, the values of 19 of the 20 most informative descriptors showed dramatically higher similarities between Van Gogh (left below) and Pollock (right) than between Van Gogh and painters such as Monet and Renoir, who conventional art criticism would think more closely related to Van Gogh's oeuvre than Pollock's is. (Dali and Ernst, by contrast, were farther apart then expected.)
令人吃惊的是，在提供的消息最有用的20种描述符中，有19种显示出梵高和波洛克作品之间的相似度，要远远高于梵高和像莫内和雷诺瓦的画家之间，而传统的评论家认为后者的作品与梵高作品更接近。相反地，达利和恩斯特的作品的差距却比预期要大。
What is interesting, according to Dr Shamir, is that no single feature makes Pollock's artistic style similar to Van Gogh's.
有趣的是，Shamir博士指出，没有一个特质能单独证明波洛克的艺术风格与梵高的相似。
Instead, the connection is based on a broad set of image-content descriptors which reflect many aspects of the two artists' styles, including a shared preference for low-level textures and shapes, and similarities in the ways they employed lines and edges.
相反，他们的联系是在长长的一系列反映了这两名画家的许多艺术风格的图像内容解析符的基础上形成的，风格中包括，他们都偏爱低档面料跟外形，他们勾勒线和边的方式相似。
What was intended, then, as a way of improving the ability to distinguish between different hands has also thrown up a new way of looking for stylistic similarities.
于是，原本用来宜于区分不同画家的作品的方法，也能用来寻找艺术家的不同风格。
Whether Pollock was actually influenced by Van Gogh, or merely happened upon a similar way of doing things through a similar artistic sensibility, is not clear.
虽然波洛克实际上到底是受到了梵高的影响，还是仅仅是由于在处在相似的艺术风气下，不得而知。
But it gives art historians a new line of investigation to pursue.
但是它给艺术历史学家提供了一条新的线索。
