I think a computer can have a need for art. Or at least this program can. A computer and its software or other programs are very different. We all live such dynamic lives with so many possibilities, things to do, places to see, etc. But this program only has one thing to do, make and analyze art. Plus its world compared to ours is infinitely smaller, so it pretty much has only one need and I fulfills that, otherwise it would break and those wonderful programmers would have to debug for more endless hours. If it works=TRUE, if it doesn't=FALSE. TRUE also means its happy.

While I think it is possible to program a computer with vast numbers of human responses to vast libraries of visual imagery, from which it can pull the closest analogues of a specific image, and call this "analysis of artwork", to me it's still a mile wide and an inch deep. The emotional response to an artwork is produced by that specific image, not by a partial match to some other image.

Sure, a computer can create art, provided there's someone there to call it art. Recall that Picasso and others incorporated "found objects" into their artworks, and Marcel Duchamps exhibited a urinal as art, "because I say it's art." Although a computer has no emotions or aesthetic sensibilities, it can certainly execute algorithms to produce audio and/or visual output which is stimulating to us emotional and aesthetically-sensitive humans. Think of all those gorgeously-convoluted fractal patterns that only a computer could generate. I'm no computer wizard, but I can imagine many things I could tell a computer to do to generate patterns or images that would surprise and please me, including telling it to incorporate random actions over which I had no control.

Human's have a need to create art. It is a way of making sense of the world. Can a computer have a need for art?

As both scientist and professional artist, I am convinced that creativity requires self entertainment. Thus, the question: can a computer entertain itself?