Q&A: The AI composer

Computer scientist Luc Steels uses artificial intelligence to explore the origins and evolution of language. He is best known for his 1999-2001 Talking Heads Experiment, in which robots had to construct a language from scratch to communicate with each other. Now Steels, who works at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), has composed an opera based on the legend of Faust, with a twenty-first-century twist. He talks about Mozart as a nascent computer programmer, how music maps onto language, and the blurred boundaries of a digitized world.