Creativity

(a subtopic of Cognitive Science)

Contents Good Places to Start Readings Online Related Web Sites Related Pages More Readings

How can [a creative idea] arise, then, if not by magic? And how can one impossible idea be more surprising, more creative, than another? How can creativity happen? - from Margaret Boden's Creativity and Unpredictability

Good Places to Start

Can computers be creative? By Ben Silburn. BBC (November 11, 2001). "Creativity is one of those things which makes humans so special. But could there ever be a day when computers are composers, theoretical physicists, or artists? There are already a number of projects in artificial intelligence that try to recreate creativity in computers. Harold Cohen has spent his whole career designing a program called Aaron which creates original works of art. ... Working in a similar field, Viennese researchers are teaching a computer to play like a human pianist, finding patterns in the performance of real pianists. In other words, they are reducing a creative event to a sequence of rules. It is getting harder all the time to tell where man stops and machine starts."

Aaron's History. From Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies, Inc. "Explore the links [offered] to learn more about how AARON works, to understand some of the challenges faced by Harold Cohen in trying to teach a machine to paint, and to explore the question, 'Is the computer being creative?'"

Creativity and Unpredictability. By Margaret Boden. From Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities: A special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review [Volume 4, issue 2; Spring 1995] edited by Stefano Franchi and Guven Guzeldere. "A scientific account of creativity is possible only if the ideas conveyed metaphorically in Section II can be clearly expressed. ... One way in which this can be done is to use the methods of artificial intelligence (AI), in which conceptual spaces can be mapped and explored, and sometimes transformed."

• More papers by MFargaret Boden can be found in the Readings Online section below.
• Also see this video: Reflections on Science - Creativity and Computers, a discussion with Margaret Boden, University of Sussex (1998). Available from The Vega Science Trust. "The concept of creativity from the point of view of how original ideas develop is explored with the aid of recent advances in computer modelling programming strategies. eaturing some beautiful examples, Margaret addresses the question, can computers ever be truly creative?"

Creativity at the Meta Level. Bruce Buchanan's Presidential Address at AAAI-2000. The address and the accompanying sides can be accessed from AAAI's collection of Presidential Addresses. The address also appears in AI Magazine 22(3): Fall 2001, 13-28.

• Abstract: "Creativity is sometimes taken to be an inexplicable aspect of human activity. By summarizing a considerable body of literature on creativity, I hope to show how to turn some of the best ideas about creativity into programs that are demonstrably more creative than any we have seen to date. I believe the key to building more creative programs is to give them the ability to reflect on and modify their own frameworks and criteria. That is, I believe that the key to creativity is at the metalevel."

Interview with Herbert Simon in OMNI Magazine. Interviewed June 1994, by Doug Stewart. Among the many probing questions, you'll find: "Is creativity anything more than problem-solving?"

Creative Solutions to Problems. By John McCarthy (1999). "The idea is to chip a piece out of the problem of creativity by defining a creative solution to a problem relative to the functions and predicates used in posing the problem. The simplification comes from not talking about the creativity of the problem solver but only about the creativity of the solution."

Readings Online

Agents & Creativity. By Margaret A. Boden. "Published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, special issue on Agents (ed. D. Riecken), summer 1994."

Artificial Genius. By Margaret A. Boden. Discover Magazine. (October 1996). The full text is available from the magazine's online archive.

Precis of "The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms". By Margaret A. Boden. [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1990 (Expanded edn., London: Abacus, 1991.)] "[U]nedited preprint (not a quotable final draft) of: Boden, Margaret A. (1994). Precis of The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (3): 519-570. The final published draft of the target article, commentaries and Author's Response are currently available only in paper."

Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, a Storytelling Machine (1999). By Selmer Bringsjord David Ferrucci. The Preface is available online via a link from Selmer Bringsjord's web site.

Proceeings of the Fourth Symposium on Creativity in AI and Cognitive Science. AISB-2002. Amilcar Cardoso and Geraint A. Wiggins, editors. One of the many convention proceedings available from The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB).

Colouring Without Seeing: A Problem in Machine Creativity. By Harold Cohen. (1999). Just one of the many papers available in this collection of papers by Harold Cohen, creator of Aaron, the painter.

Computational Creativity. An AI Bite by Simon Colton. Sponsored by, and available from, The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour.

The Effect of Input Knowledge on Creativity. By S. Colton, A. Pease and G. Ritchie (November 2001). Division of Informations at The University of Edinburgh. "Recently, many programs have been written to perform tasks which are usually regarded as requiring creativity in humans. We can derive some commonalities between these programs in order to build further creative programs."

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Papers from the 1993 Spring Symposium, ed. Terry Dartnall and Steven Kim. Technical Report SS-93-01. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, California.

The Creativity Machine By Bob Holmes. New Scientist, January 20, 1996. "It writes music, invents soft drinks and dreams up hard materials. The man who built it points the way to immortality says Bob Holmes."

John Koza Has Built An Invention Machine - Its creations earn patents, outperform humans, and will soon fly to space. All it needs now is a few worthy challenges. By Jonathon Keats. Popular Science (April 19, 2006). "John Holland has lately been researching what such ingenuity might tell us about the creative process in humans. He believes that revolutionary ideas don’t come at random but are 'new combinations of fairly standard parts with which we’re already familiar.' He cites as examples the internal combustion engine and the airplane, for which all the components were available long before the invention came along, lacking only someone with adequately broad knowledge, deep resources and the temperament to combine them."

If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an Artist? By Dylan Loeb McClain. The New York Times (January 25, 2003; no fee reg. req'd). "But if computers become better than humans at chess, does that mean that computers are being artistic or that chess is essentially a complicated puzzle? ... Chess is not the only field where computers have achieved success formerly thought to be achievable only through human creativity. In 1997, six months after the victory by Deep Blue, a competition was held at Stanford University between a human and a computer to see which could compose music in the style of Bach. The computer won."

Assessing Creativity. By Graeme Ritchie (April 2001). Division of Informations at The University of Edinburgh. " In exploring the question of whether a computer program is behaving creatively, it is important to be explicit, and if possible formal, about the criteria that are being applied in making judgements of creativity."

Making Machines Creative. By Roger C. Schank & Chip Cleary. (1995). In: S Smith, T B Ward & R A Finke (eds) The Creative Cognition Approach. MIT Press. 229-247. "For much of the history of AI and cognitive science, creativity was viewed as an esoteric and perhaps somewhat magical process that was above and beyond 'normal' processing. As a result, few researchers have risked tackling it. Instead of being banished to the untouchable heights of cognition, creativity belongs squarely in its center. Far from being esoteric, creativity arises from relatively simple mental processes. Far from being magical, it depends on pre-existing, though complex, mental structures. The creative process is not above and beyond 'normal' reasoning, but rather is central to it."

The Mechanics of Creativity. By Roger Schank and Christopher Owens. From Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). "Our goal is to come up with an algorithmic definition of creativity, a set of processes and steps that can account for the kind of creative thinking that we observe in people. Although the idea of a human or machine exhibiting creativity by following a set of rules seems on the face to be a contradiction, this is not necessarily so."

Related Web Sites

Computational Creativity Workshop at IJCAI-05. "This workshop will bring together researchers from AI, Cognitive Science and other related areas such as Psychology, Philosophy and Arts working on Computational Creativity, providing the opportunity to promote presentation and discussion of ongoing work in the area. The workshop should encourage cross-fertilization between the various approaches, including the study of cognitive and computational models for Creativity, and the application of current AI techniques to the development of Creative Systems. The workshop will provide a forum for identifying trends and opportunities for research on creativity and promising practices concerning the development of creative systems. This workshop is the latest in a growing list of events that have, since 1997, solidified and added rigour to the computational treatment of creative processes (symposia and workshops associated with AISB 00, ICCBR 01, AISB 01, ECAI 02, AISB 02, IJCAI 03, AISB 03, LREC 04, ECCBR 04)."

• Also see: Workshops on Creative Systems - Approaches to Creativity in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science:
  • 3rd Workshop at IJCAI-03
  • 2nd Workshop at ECAI-02
  • 1st Workshop at ICCBR-01

Creative Agents Project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science. "Deep Blue is an intelligent agent; no question about that. But is Deep Blue creative? Probably not: it cranks away, searching mindlessly and inescapably within a framework given to it by some rather ingenious humans. In many ways Deep Blue is no more creative than a conventional calculator. The Creative Agents project aims at building genuinely creative agents that will be of interest to not only researchers within AI and Cog Sci, but also to companies who would be able to profit from the deployment of such agents amongst their workforces."

Creative Systems. Departamento de Engenharia Informatica Universidade de Coimbra,, Portugal. "The Creative Systems Area of the AI Group/CISUC researches computational models of creativity, looking for sources of inspiration in explanation models for human creativity, originated in the Psychology and Cognitive Science fields, and also in models of natural evolution. We explore symbolic approaches (e.g., CBR) and also non-symbolic approaches (e.g., Genetic Programming)." -excerpt from "Our Goals"

"The SWALE project [conducted by Alex Kass, David Leake, and Chris Owens, advised by Roger Schank and Chris Riesbeck] explores case-based reasoning (CBR) as a basis for creativity. In the CBR model of creativity, creativity comes from retrieving knowledge that is not routinely applied to a situation, and using it in a new way. In this view, the key issues for creativity are how to retrieve appropriate knowledge for novel uses and how to adapt it to fit novel circumstances. Depending on the retrieval and adaptation processes used, CBR can provide solutions anywhere along a spectrum of creativity, ranging from straightforward reapplications of old knowledge all the way to highly novel views."

Related AI Topics Pages

• Art
• Drama, Fiction, Music, Poetry, ...
• Scientific Discovery (See for example Pat Langley's paper which begins with the observation: "The process of scientific discovery has long been viewed as the pinnacle of creative thought. Thus, to many people, including some scientists themselves, it seems an unlikely candidate for automation by computer.")

More Readings

Margaret A. Boden: Creativity and Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 103(1-2): 347-356 (1998).

Herbert Simon: interviewed June 1994, by Doug Stewart. Omni Magazine. "Is creativity anything more than problem-solving? Simon: I don't think so. What's involved in being creative? The ability to make selective searches. For that, you first need knowledge and then the ability to recognize cues indexed to that knowledge in particular situations. That lets you pull out the right knowledge at the right time. The systems we built to simulate scientific or any kind of creativity are based on those principles." [No longer available online.]