The synchronicity here is this is a large discussion I have been having at work (I'm a research chemist) with my great-grandboss, who believes that if you take a large machine, program the variations that you want to make into it, and have a second automated testing machine, that we could screen new compounds and formulations a lot more quickly. I directed him to a couple of Doug Hofstadter's essays "On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity" where he says "Making variations on a theme is the essence of creativity." What I didn't dare quote was Arthur C. Clarke's "The Ultimate Melody" (written in about 1955! the listener went mad, like Ulysses's crew on hearing the Sirens) and Spider Robinson's short story, "Melancholy Elephants" where he depicts a world in which all of the good melodies have already been discovered (after all, there can only be a finite number, and we may discover that the vein gets mined out more quickly than we ever imagined) and are permanently copyrighted, and, as the Preacher lamented, and Gargoyle has quoted, there is nothing new under the sun. My personal thoughts: my g-gboss is wrong (how does one tell the dictator politely that he is wrong? very much another question) and that the work of deciding which variations are worth programming into the machine will require far more creativity than the present system, and that this approach is a blind alley. That having been said, there was a time, some years ago, when I found a creative solution to a problem I had been wrestling with for six months (work-related) and the joy of realizing that that was the right solution and HAD to work (it was testable in five minutes once I thought of it) was one I will never forget, right up there with watching my daughters get born. I wish I were that creative musically and able to write good tunes or even sequences of chords. I wrote down BanjoBonnie's chord progression that she discovered/invented/created about four months ago and I said WOW, this is nice! (and felt just a little envious) when she gets the musical tools to match what's going on in her head, some very nice things are going to happen. And 100 years from now our descendants may be playing them.