Can machines create?

Do androids dream of electric beats? In 2012, Iamus released a CD of classical music performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Music critic Tom Service was somewhat dismissive, calling Iamus's composition Hello World! "so unmemorable, and the way it's elaborated so workaday, that the piece leaves no distinctive impression." But it wasn't a bad debut really--when you consider that Iamus is not a composer but a computer algorithm, developed by researchers at the University of Málaga in Spain. Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, doesn't talk about Iamus in his new book The Creativity Code, but the question he poses about such efforts amounts to this: can we call Iamus a composer? When Iamus's compositions were played to musically informed listeners, they were unable to distinguish them from music in a similar (modernist) style composed by humans.