Recent advances in sketch recognition

Abstract

In a shocking and almost silly interview with Max Jacobson, Christopher Alexander recounted the following story. "There was a conference which I was invited to a few months ago where computer graphics was being discussed as one item and I was arguing very strongly against computer graphics simply because of the frame of mind that you need to be in to create a good building. Are you at peace with yourself? Are you thinking about smell and touch, and what happens when people are walking about in a place? But particularly, are you at peace with yourself? All of that is completely disturbed by the pretentiousness, insistence and complicatedness of computer graphics and all the allied techniques. So my final objection to that and to other types of methodology is that they actually prevent you from being in the right state of mind to do the design, quite apart from the question of whether they help in a sort of technical sense, which, as I said, I don't think they do."