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Computational creativity (also known as artificial creativity, mechanical creativity, creative computing or creative computation) is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and
the arts The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both ...
(e.g., computational art as part of computational culture). The goal of computational creativity is to model, simulate or replicate creativity using a computer, to achieve one of several ends: * To construct a program or computer capable of human-level
creativity Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed Literature ...
. * To better understand human creativity and to formulate an algorithmic perspective on creative behavior in humans. * To design programs that can enhance human creativity without necessarily being creative themselves. The field of computational creativity concerns itself with theoretical and practical issues in the study of creativity. Theoretical work on the nature and proper definition of creativity is performed in parallel with practical work on the implementation of systems that exhibit creativity, with one strand of work informing the other. The applied form of computational creativity is known as media synthesis.


Theoretical issues

If eminent creativity is about rule-breaking or the disavowal of convention, how is it possible for an algorithmic system to be creative? In essence, this is a variant of Ada Lovelace's objection to machine intelligence, as recapitulated by modern theorists such as Teresa Amabile. If a machine can do only what it was programmed to do, how can its behavior ever be called ''creative''? Indeed, not all computer theorists would agree with the premise that computers can only do what they are programmed to do—a key point in favor of computational creativity.


Defining creativity in computational terms

Because no single perspective or definition seems to offer a complete picture of creativity, the AI researchers Newell, Shaw and Simon developed the combination of novelty and usefulness into the cornerstone of a multi-pronged view of creativity, one that uses the following four criteria to categorize a given answer or solution as creative: # The answer is novel and useful (either for the individual or for society) # The answer demands that we reject ideas we had previously accepted # The answer results from intense motivation and persistence # The answer comes from clarifying a problem that was originally vague Whereas the above reflects a top-down approach to computational creativity, an alternative thread has developed among bottom-up computational psychologists involved in artificial neural network research. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, such generative neural systems were driven by genetic algorithms. Experiments involving recurrent nets were successful in hybridizing simple musical melodies and predicting listener expectations. In his book, Superhuman Creators, Al Byrd argues that the primary source of creativity in humans and other animals is affordance awareness – awareness of the action possibilities in an environment. Superhuman creativity can be achieved by increasing the affordance awareness of artificial entities dramatically, and integrating that awareness tightly with the systems capable of capitalizing on the action possibilities.


Machine learning for computational creativity

While traditional computational approaches to creativity rely on the explicit formulation of prescriptions by developers and a certain degree of randomness in computer programs, machine learning methods allow computer programs to learn on heuristics from input data enabling creative capacities within the computer programs. Especially, deep artificial neural networks allow to learn patterns from input data that allow for the non-linear generation of creative artefacts. Before 1989,
artificial neural network Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...
s have been used to model certain aspects of creativity. Peter Todd (1989) first trained a neural network to reproduce musical melodies from a training set of musical pieces. Then he used a change algorithm to modify the network's input parameters. The network was able to randomly generate new music in a highly uncontrolled manner. In 1992, Toddextended this work, using the so-called distal teacher approach that had been developed by Paul Munro, Paul Werbos, D. Nguyen and Bernard Widrow, Michael I. Jordan and
David Rumelhart David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artif ...
. In the new approach there are two neural networks, one of which is supplying training patterns to another. In later efforts by Todd, a composer would select a set of melodies that define the melody space, position them on a 2-d plane with a mouse-based graphic interface, and train a connectionist network to produce those melodies, and listen to the new "interpolated" melodies that the network generates corresponding to intermediate points in the 2-d plane.


Key concepts from the literature

Some high-level and philosophical themes recur throughout the field of computational creativity.


Important categories of creativity

Margaret Boden refers to creativity that is novel ''merely to the agent that produces it'' as "P-creativity" (or "psychological creativity"), and refers to creativity that is recognized as novel ''by society at large'' as "H-creativity" (or "historical creativity"). Stephen Thaler has suggested a new category he calls "V-" or "Visceral creativity" wherein significance is invented through neural mapping to raw sensory inputs to a Creativity Machine architecture, with the "gateway" nets perturbed to produce alternative interpretations, and downstream nets shifting such interpretations to fit the overarching context. An important variety of such V-creativity is consciousness itself, wherein meaning is reflexively invented to activation turnover within the brain. Value driven creativity gives more freedom and autonomy to the AI system.


Exploratory and transformational creativity

Boden also distinguishes between the creativity that arises from an exploration within an established conceptual space, and the creativity that arises from a deliberate transformation or transcendence of this space. She labels the former as ''exploratory creativity'' and the latter as ''transformational creativity'', seeing the latter as a form of creativity far more radical, challenging, and rarer than the former. Following the criteria from Newell and Simon elaborated above, we can see that both forms of creativity should produce results that are appreciably novel and useful (criterion 1), but exploratory creativity is more likely to arise from a thorough and persistent search of a well-understood space (criterion 3) -- while transformational creativity should involve the rejection of some of the constraints that define this space (criterion 2) or some of the assumptions that define the problem itself (criterion 4). Boden's insights have guided work in computational creativity at a very general level, providing more an inspirational touchstone for development work than a technical framework of algorithmic substance. However, Boden's insights are also the subject of formalization, most notably in the work by Geraint Wiggins.


Generation and evaluation

The criterion that creative products should be novel and useful means that creative computational systems are typically structured into two phases, generation and evaluation. In the first phase, novel (to the system itself, thus P-Creative) constructs are generated; unoriginal constructs that are already known to the system are filtered at this stage. This body of potentially creative constructs is then evaluated, to determine which are meaningful and useful and which are not. This two-phase structure conforms to the Geneplore model of Finke, Ward and Smith, which is a psychological model of creative generation based on empirical observation of human creativity.


Combinatorial creativity

A great deal, perhaps all, of human creativity can be understood as a novel combination of pre-existing ideas or objects. Common strategies for combinatorial creativity include: *Placing a familiar object in an unfamiliar setting (e.g.,
Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
's ''
Fountain A fountain, from the Latin "fons" (genitive "fontis"), meaning source or spring, is a decorative reservoir used for discharging water. It is also a structure that jets water into the air for a decorative or dramatic effect. Fountains were ori ...
'') or an unfamiliar object in a familiar setting (e.g., a fish-out-of-water story such as ''
The Beverly Hillbillies ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' is an American television sitcom that was broadcast on CBS from 1962 to 1971. It had an ensemble cast featuring Buddy Ebsen, Irene Ryan, Donna Douglas, and Max Baer Jr. as the Clampetts, a poor, backwoods family f ...
'') *Blending two superficially different objects or genres (e.g., a sci-fi story set in the Wild West, with robot cowboys, as in ''
Westworld ''Westworld'' is an American science fiction-thriller media franchise that began with the 1973 film ''Westworld'', written and directed by Michael Crichton. The film depicts a technologically advanced Wild-West-themed amusement park populate ...
'', or the reverse, as in '' Firefly''; Japanese
haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or s ...
poems, etc.) *Comparing a familiar object to a superficially unrelated and semantically distant concept (e.g., "Makeup is the Western burka"; "A
zoo A zoo (short for zoological garden; also called an animal park or menagerie) is a facility in which animals are kept within enclosures for public exhibition and often bred for conservation purposes. The term ''zoological garden'' refers to zoo ...
is a gallery with living exhibits") *Adding a new and unexpected feature to an existing concept (e.g., adding a
scalpel A scalpel, lancet, or bistoury is a small and extremely sharp bladed instrument used for surgery, anatomical dissection, podiatry and various arts and crafts (either called a hobby knife or an X-acto knife.). Scalpels may be single-use dispos ...
to a Swiss Army knife; adding a
camera A camera is an optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), with a ...
to a
mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whi ...
) *Compressing two incongruous scenarios into the same narrative to get a joke (e.g., the
Emo Philips Emo Philips (born Philip Soltanec February 7, 1956) is an American actor, stand-up comedian, writer and producer. His stand-up comedy persona makes use of paraprosdokians spoken in a wandering falsetto tone of voice. The confused, childlike deli ...
joke "Women are always using men to advance their careers. Damned anthropologists!") *Using an iconic image from one domain in a domain for an unrelated or incongruous idea or product (e.g., using the
Marlboro Man The Marlboro Man is a figure that was used in tobacco advertising campaigns for Marlboro cigarettes. In the United States, where the campaign originated, it was used from 1954 to 1999. The Marlboro Man was first conceived by Leo Burnett in 1954. ...
image to sell cars, or to advertise the dangers of smoking-related impotence). The combinatorial perspective allows us to model creativity as a search process through the space of possible combinations. The combinations can arise from composition or concatenation of different representations, or through a rule-based or stochastic transformation of initial and intermediate representations. Genetic algorithms and neural networks can be used to generate blended or crossover representations that capture a combination of different inputs.


Conceptual blending

Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier propose a model called Conceptual Integration Networks that elaborates upon
Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler, (, ; ; hu, Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler join ...
's ideas about
creativity Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed Literature ...
as well as work by Lakoff and Johnson, by synthesizing ideas from Cognitive Linguistic research into mental spaces and
conceptual metaphors In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the pr ...
. Their basic model defines an integration network as four connected spaces: *A first input space (contains one conceptual structure or mental space) *A second input space (to be blended with the first input) *A ''generic space'' of stock conventions and image-schemas that allow the input spaces to be understood from an integrated perspective *A ''blend space'' in which a selected projection of elements from both input spaces are combined; inferences arising from this combination also reside here, sometimes leading to emergent structures that conflict with the inputs. Fauconnier and Turner describe a collection of optimality principles that are claimed to guide the construction of a well-formed integration network. In essence, they see blending as a compression mechanism in which two or more input structures are compressed into a single blend structure. This compression operates on the level of conceptual relations. For example, a series of similarity relations between the input spaces can be compressed into a single identity relationship in the blend. Some computational success has been achieved with the blending model by extending pre-existing computational models of analogical mapping that are compatible by virtue of their emphasis on connected semantic structures. In 2006, Francisco Câmara Pereira presented an implementation of blending theory that employs ideas both from
GOFAI GOFAI is an acronym for "Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence" invented by the philosopher John Haugeland in his 1985 book, ''Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea''. Technically, GOFAI refers only to a restricted kind of symbolic AI, name ...
and
genetic algorithms In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to gene ...
to realize some aspects of blending theory in a practical form; his example domains range from the linguistic to the visual, and the latter most notably includes the creation of mythical monsters by combining 3-D graphical models.


Linguistic creativity

Language provides continuous opportunity for creativity, evident in the generation of novel sentences, phrasings,
pun A pun, also known as paronomasia, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use of homophoni ...
s,
neologism A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
s, rhymes,
allusion Allusion is a figure of speech, in which an object or circumstance from unrelated context is referred to covertly or indirectly. It is left to the audience to make the direct connection. Where the connection is directly and explicitly stated (as ...
s,
sarcasm Sarcasm is the caustic use of words, often in a humorous way, to mock someone or something. Sarcasm may employ ambivalence, although it is not necessarily ironic. Most noticeable in spoken word, sarcasm is mainly distinguished by the inflection ...
, irony,
simile A simile () is a figure of speech that directly ''compares'' two things. Similes differ from other metaphors by highlighting the similarities between two things using comparison words such as "like", "as", "so", or "than", while other metaphors c ...
s,
metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wi ...
s,
analogies Analogy (from Greek ''analogia'', "proportion", from ''ana-'' "upon, according to" lso "against", "anew"+ ''logos'' "ratio" lso "word, speech, reckoning" is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject ...
,
witticism Wit is a form of intelligent humour, the ability to say or write things that are clever and usually funny. Someone witty is a person who is skilled at making clever and funny remarks. Forms of wit include the quip, repartee, and wisecrack. Form ...
s, and
joke A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laughter, laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with ...
s. Native speakers of morphologically rich languages frequently create new word-forms that are easily understood, and some have found their way to the dictionary. The area of
natural language generation Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. In one of the most widely-cited survey of NLG methods, NLG is characterized as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics th ...
has been well studied, but these creative aspects of everyday language have yet to be incorporated with any robustness or scale.


Hypothesis of creative patterns

In the seminal work of applied linguist Ronald Carter, he hypothesized two main creativity types involving words and word patterns: pattern-reforming creativity, and pattern-forming creativity. Pattern-reforming creativity refers to creativity by the breaking of rules, reforming and reshaping patterns of language often through individual innovation, while pattern-forming creativity refers to creativity via conformity to language rules rather than breaking them, creating convergence, symmetry and greater mutuality between interlocutors through their interactions in the form of repetitions.


Story generation

Substantial work has been conducted in this area of linguistic creation since the 1970s, with the development of James Meehan's TALE-SPIN system. TALE-SPIN viewed stories as narrative descriptions of a problem-solving effort, and created stories by first establishing a goal for the story's characters so that their search for a solution could be tracked and recorded. The MINSTREL system represents a complex elaboration of this basic approach, distinguishing a range of character-level goals in the story from a range of author-level goals for the story. Systems like Bringsjord's BRUTUS elaborate these ideas further to create stories with complex inter-personal themes like betrayal. Nonetheless, MINSTREL explicitly models the creative process with a set of Transform Recall Adapt Methods (TRAMs) to create novel scenes from old. The MEXICA model of Rafael Pérez y Pérez and Mike Sharples is more explicitly interested in the creative process of storytelling, and implements a version of the engagement-reflection cognitive model of creative writing.


Metaphor and simile

Example of a metaphor: ''"She was an ape."'' Example of a simile: ''"Felt like a tiger-fur blanket.''" The computational study of these phenomena has mainly focused on interpretation as a knowledge-based process. Computationalists such as
Yorick Wilks Yorick Wilks FBCS (born 27 October 1939), a British computer scientist, is emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham College (a post created especiall ...
, James Martin, Dan Fass, John Barnden, and Mark Lee have developed knowledge-based approaches to the processing of metaphors, either at a linguistic level or a logical level. Tony Veale and Yanfen Hao have developed a system, called Sardonicus, that acquires a comprehensive database of explicit similes from the web; these similes are then tagged as bona-fide (e.g., "as hard as steel") or ironic (e.g., "as hairy as a
bowling ball A bowling ball is a hard spherical ball used to knock down bowling pins in the sport of bowling. Balls used in ten-pin bowling and American nine-pin bowling traditionally have holes for two fingers and the thumb. Balls used in five-pin bowling, ...
", "as pleasant as a
root canal A root canal is the naturally occurring anatomic space within the root of a tooth. It consists of the pulp chamber (within the coronal part of the tooth), the main canal(s), and more intricate anatomical branches that may connect the root ...
"); similes of either type can be retrieved on demand for any given adjective. They use these similes as the basis of an on-line metaphor generation system called Aristotle that can suggest lexical metaphors for a given descriptive goal (e.g., to describe a supermodel as skinny, the source terms "pencil", "whip", "
whippet The Whippet is a dog breed of medium size. It is a sighthound breed that originated in England, descended from the Greyhound. Whippets today still strongly resemble a smaller Greyhound. Part of the hound group, Whippets have relatively few ...
", "rope", " stick-insect" and "snake" are suggested).


Analogy

The process of analogical reasoning has been studied from both a mapping and a retrieval perspective, the latter being key to the generation of novel analogies. The dominant school of research, as advanced by
Dedre Gentner Dedre Dariel Gentner (born 1944) is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. She is a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning. Wor ...
, views analogy as a structure-preserving process; this view has been implemented in the structure mapping engine or SME, the MAC/FAC retrieval engine (Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen), ACME ( Analogical Constraint Mapping Engine) and ARCS ( Analogical Retrieval Constraint System). Other mapping-based approaches include Sapper, which situates the mapping process in a semantic-network model of memory. Analogy is a very active sub-area of creative computation and creative cognition; active figures in this sub-area include Douglas Hofstadter,
Paul Thagard Paul Richard Thagard (; born 1950) is a Canadian philosopher who specializes in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Thagard is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He i ...
, and
Keith Holyoak Keith James Holyoak (born January 16, 1950) is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on human thinking and reasoning. Holyoak's work focuses on the role of analogy in thinking. His work showed ho ...
. Also worthy of note here is Peter Turney and Michael Littman's
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
approach to the solving of
SAT The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and scoring have changed several times; originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, it was later called the Schol ...
-style analogy problems; their approach achieves a score that compares well with average scores achieved by humans on these tests.


Joke generation

Humour is an especially knowledge-hungry process, and the most successful joke-generation systems to date have focussed on pun-generation, as exemplified by the work of Kim Binsted and Graeme Ritchie. This work includes the
JAPE Jape is a synonym for a practical joke. Jape or JAPE may also refer to: * Jape (band), an Irish electronic/rock band * JAPE (linguistics), a transformation language widely used in natural language processing * JAPE, an automated pun generator * J ...
system, which can generate a wide range of puns that are consistently evaluated as novel and humorous by young children. An improved version of JAPE has been developed in the guise of the STANDUP system, which has been experimentally deployed as a means of enhancing linguistic interaction with children with communication disabilities. Some limited progress has been made in generating humour that involves other aspects of natural language, such as the deliberate misunderstanding of pronominal reference (in the work of Hans Wim Tinholt and Anton Nijholt), as well as in the generation of humorous acronyms in the HAHAcronym system of Oliviero Stock and Carlo Strapparava.


Neologism

The blending of multiple word forms is a dominant force for new word creation in language; these new words are commonly called "blends" or "
portmanteau word A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsLewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are '' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequ ...
). Tony Veale has developed a system called ZeitGeist that harvests neological
headword In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' ...
s from
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
and interprets them relative to their local context in Wikipedia and relative to specific word senses in
WordNet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short defin ...
. ZeitGeist has been extended to generate neologisms of its own; the approach combines elements from an inventory of word parts that are harvested from WordNet, and simultaneously determines likely glosses for these new words (e.g., "food traveller" for "gastronaut" and "time traveller" for " chrononaut"). It then uses
Web search Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
to determine which glosses are meaningful and which neologisms have not been used before; this search identifies the subset of generated words that are both novel ("H-creative") and useful. A corpus linguistic approach to the search and extraction of
neologism A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
have also shown to be possible. Using
Corpus of Contemporary American English The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is a one-billion-word corpus of contemporary American English. It was created by Mark Davies, retired professor of corpus linguistics at Brigham Young University (BYU). Content The Corpus of Co ...
as a reference corpus, Locky Law has performed an extraction of
neologism A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
,
portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordshapax legomena which appeared in the scripts of American
TV drama In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super-ge ...
House M.D. In terms of linguistic research in neologism, Stefan Th. Gries has performed a quantitative analysis of blend structure in English and found that "the degree of recognizability of the source words and that the similarity of source words to the blend plays a vital role in blend formation." The results were validated through a comparison of intentional blends to speech-error blends.


Poetry

Like jokes, poems involve a complex interaction of different constraints, and no general-purpose poem generator adequately combines the meaning, phrasing, structure and rhyme aspects of poetry. Nonetheless, Pablo Gervás has developed a noteworthy system called ASPERA that employs a
case-based reasoning In artificial intelligence and philosophy, case-based reasoning (CBR), broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems. In everyday life, an auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recallin ...
(CBR) approach to generating poetic formulations of a given input text via a composition of poetic fragments that are retrieved from a case-base of existing poems. Each poem fragment in the ASPERA case-base is annotated with a prose string that expresses the meaning of the fragment, and this prose string is used as the retrieval key for each fragment. Metrical rules are then used to combine these fragments into a well-formed poetic structure. Racter is an example of such a software project.


Musical creativity

Computational creativity in the music domain has focused both on the generation of musical scores for use by human musicians, and on the generation of music for performance by computers. The domain of generation has included classical music (with software that generates music in the style of Mozart and
Bach Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the ''Brandenburg Concertos''; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard wor ...
) and
jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...
. Most notably,
David Cope David Cope (born May 17, 1941 in San Francisco, California) is an American author, composer, scientist, and former professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). His primary area of research involves artificial intellige ...
has written a software system called "Experiments in Musical Intelligence" (or "EMI") that is capable of analyzing and generalizing from existing music by a human composer to generate novel musical compositions in the same style. EMI's output is convincing enough to persuade human listeners that its music is human-generated to a high level of competence. In the field of contemporary classical music,
Iamus In Greek mythology, Iamus (Ancient Greek: Ἴαμος) was the son of Apollo and Evadne, a daughter of Poseidon, raised by Aepytus. Mythology Evadne loved Apollo and by him she became pregnant, but was shamed by Aepytus for her pregnancy. When ...
is the first computer that composes from scratch, and produces final scores that professional interpreters can play. The
London Symphony Orchestra The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is a British symphony orchestra based in London. Founded in 1904, the LSO is the oldest of London's symphony orchestras. The LSO was created by a group of players who left Henry Wood's Queen's Hall Orc ...
played a piece for full orchestra, included in Iamus' debut CD, which ''
New Scientist ''New Scientist'' is a magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publish ...
'' described as "The first major work composed by a computer and performed by a full orchestra".
Melomics Melomics (derived from "genomics of melodies") is a computational system for the automatic composition of music (with no human intervention), based on bioinspired algorithms. Technological aspects Melomics applies an evolutionary approach t ...
, the technology behind Iamus, is able to generate pieces in different styles of music with a similar level of quality. Creativity research in jazz has focused on the process of improvisation and the cognitive demands that this places on a musical agent: reasoning about time, remembering and conceptualizing what has already been played, and planning ahead for what might be played next. The robot Shimon, developed by Gil Weinberg of Georgia Tech, has demonstrated jazz improvisation. Virtual improvisation software based on researches on stylistic modeling carried out by Gerard Assayag and Shlomo Dubnov include OMax, SoMax and PyOracle, are used to create improvisations in real-time by re-injecting variable length sequences learned on the fly from live performer. In 1994, a Creativity Machine architecture (see above) was able to generate 11,000 musical hooks by training a synaptically perturbed neural net on 100 melodies that had appeared on the top ten list over the last 30 years. In 1996, a self-bootstrapping Creativity Machine observed audience facial expressions through an advanced machine vision system and perfected its musical talents to generate an album entitled "Song of the Neurons" In the field of musical composition, the patented works by René-Louis Baron allowed to make a robot that can create and play a multitude of orchestrated melodies, so-called "coherent" in any musical style. All outdoor physical parameter associated with one or more specific musical parameters, can influence and develop each of these songs (in real-time while listening to the song). The patented invention '' Medal-Composer'' raises problems of copyright.


Visual and artistic creativity

Computational creativity in the generation of
visual art The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts ...
has had some notable successes in the creation of both abstract art and representational art. A well-known program in this domain is Harold Cohen's AARON, which has been continuously developed and augmented since 1973. Though formulaic, Aaron exhibits a range of outputs, generating black-and-white drawings or colour paintings that incorporate human figures (such as dancers), potted plants, rocks, and other elements of background imagery. These images are of a sufficiently high quality to be displayed in reputable galleries. Other software artists of note include the NEvAr system (for " Neuro-Evolutionary Art") of Penousal Machado. NEvAr uses a genetic algorithm to derive a mathematical function that is then used to generate a coloured three-dimensional surface. A human user is allowed to select the best pictures after each phase of the genetic algorithm, and these preferences are used to guide successive phases, thereby pushing NEvAr's search into pockets of the search space that are considered most appealing to the user. '' The Painting Fool'', developed by Simon Colton originated as a system for overpainting digital images of a given scene in a choice of different painting styles, colour palettes and brush types. Given its dependence on an input source image to work with, the earliest iterations of the Painting Fool raised questions about the extent of, or lack of, creativity in a computational art system. Nonetheless, ''The Painting Fool'' has been extended to create novel images, much as AARON does, from its own limited imagination. Images in this vein include cityscapes and forests, which are generated by a process of
constraint satisfaction In artificial intelligence and operations research, constraint satisfaction is the process of finding a solution through a set of constraints that impose conditions that the variables must satisfy. A solution is therefore a set of values for th ...
from some basic scenarios provided by the user (e.g., these scenarios allow the system to infer that objects closer to the viewing plane should be larger and more color-saturated, while those further away should be less saturated and appear smaller). Artistically, the images now created by the Painting Fool appear on a par with those created by Aaron, though the extensible mechanisms employed by the former (constraint satisfaction, etc.) may well allow it to develop into a more elaborate and sophisticated painter. The artist Krasi Dimtch (Krasimira Dimtchevska) and the software developer Svillen Ranev have created a computational system combining a rule-based generator of English sentences and a visual composition builder that converts sentences generated by the system into abstract art. The software generates automatically indefinite number of different images using different color, shape and size palettes. The software also allows the user to select the subject of the generated sentences or/and the one or more of the palettes used by the visual composition builder. An emerging area of computational creativity is that of
video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...
s. ANGELINA is a system for creatively developing video games in Java by Michael Cook. One important aspect is Mechanic Miner, a system that can generate short segments of code that act as simple game mechanics. ANGELINA can evaluate these mechanics for usefulness by playing simple unsolvable game levels and testing to see if the new mechanic makes the level solvable. Sometimes Mechanic Miner discovers bugs in the code and exploits these to make new mechanics for the player to solve problems with. In July 2015,
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
released ''
DeepDream DeepDream is a computer vision program created by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev that uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia, thus creating a dream-like appearance reminiscent ...
'' – an open source computer vision program, created to detect faces and other patterns in images with the aim of automatically classifying images, which uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic
pareidolia Pareidolia (; ) is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Common examples are perceived images of animals, ...
, thus creating a dreamlike psychedelic appearance in the deliberately over-processed images. In August 2015, researchers from Tübingen, Germany created a convolutional neural network that uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images which is able to turn images into stylistic imitations of works of art by artists such as a Picasso or
Van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, inc ...
in about an hour. Their algorithm is put into use in the website DeepArt that allows users to create unique artistic images by their algorithm. In early 2016, a global team of researchers explained how a new computational creativity approach known as the Digital Synaptic Neural Substrate (DSNS) could be used to generate original chess puzzles that were not derived from endgame databases. The DSNS is able to combine features of different objects (e.g. chess problems, paintings, music) using stochastic methods in order to derive new feature specifications which can be used to generate objects in any of the original domains. The generated chess puzzles have also been featured on YouTube.


Creativity in problem solving

Creativity is also useful in allowing for unusual solutions in problem solving. In
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
and cognitive science, this research area is called
creative problem solving Creative problem-solving (CPS) is the mental process of searching for an original and previously unknown solution to a problem. To qualify, the solution must be novel and reached independently. The creative problem-solving process was originally de ...
. The Explicit-Implicit Interaction (EII) theory of creativity has been implemented using a CLARION-based computational model that allows for the simulation of incubation and
insight Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect within a particular context. The term insight can have several related meanings: *a piece of information *the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intui ...
in problem solving. The emphasis of this computational creativity project is not on performance per se (as in
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
projects) but rather on the explanation of the psychological processes leading to human creativity and the reproduction of data collected in psychology experiments. So far, this project has been successful in providing an explanation for incubation effects in simple memory experiments, insight in problem solving, and reproducing the overshadowing effect in problem solving.


Debate about "general" theories of creativity

Some researchers feel that creativity is a complex phenomenon whose study is further complicated by the plasticity of the language we use to describe it. We can describe not just the agent of creativity as "creative" but also the product and the method. Consequently, it could be claimed that it is unrealistic to speak of a ''general theory of creativity''. Nonetheless, some generative principles are more general than others, leading some advocates to claim that certain computational approaches are "general theories". Stephen Thaler, for instance, proposes that certain modalities of neural networks are generative enough, and general enough, to manifest a high degree of creative capabilities.


Criticism of computational creativity

Traditional computers, as mainly used in the computational creativity application, do not support creativity, as they fundamentally transform a set of discrete, limited domain of input parameters into a set of discrete, limited domain of output parameters using a limited set of computational functions. As such, a computer cannot be creative, as everything in the output must have been already present in the input data or the algorithms. Related discussions and references to related work are captured in work on philosophical foundations of simulation. Mathematically, the same set of arguments against creativity has been made by Chaitin. Similar observations come from a Model Theory perspective. All this criticism emphasizes that computational creativity is useful and may look like creativity, but it is not real creativity, as nothing new is created, just transformed in well defined algorithms.


Events

The International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) occurs annually, organized by The Association for Computational Creativity. Events in the series include: * ICCC 2019, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA * ICCC 2018, Salamanca, Spain * ICCC 2017, Atlanta, Georgia, USA * ICCC 2016, Paris, France * ICCC 2015, Park City, Utah, USA. Keynote: Emily Short * ICCC 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Keynote: Oliver Deussen * ICCC 2013, Sydney, Australia. Keynote: Arne Dietrich * ICCC 2012, Dublin, Ireland. Keynote: Steven Smith * ICCC 2011, Mexico City, Mexico. Keynote: George E Lewis * ICCC 2010, Lisbon, Portugal. Keynote/Invited Talks: Nancy J Nersessian and Mary Lou Maher Previously, the community of computational creativity has held a dedicated workshop, the International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, every year since 1999. Previous events in this series include: *IJWCC 2003, Acapulco, Mexico, as part of IJCAI'2003 *IJWCC 2004, Madrid, Spain, as part of ECCBR'2004 *IJWCC 2005, Edinburgh, UK, as part of IJCAI'2005 *IJWCC 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of ECAI'2006 *IJWCC 2007, London, UK, a stand-alone event *IJWCC 2008, Madrid, Spain, a stand-alone event The 1st Conference on Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity will be held * CCSMC 2016, 17–19 June, University of Huddersfield, UK. Keynotes: Geraint Wiggins and Graeme Bailey.


Publications and forums

Design Computing and Cognition is one conference that addresses computational creativity. The ACM Creativity and Cognition conference is another forum for issues related to computational creativity. Journées d'Informatique Musicale 2016 keynote by Shlomo Dubnov was on Information Theoretic Creativity. A number of books provide either a good introduction or a good overview of the field of computational creativity. These include: *Pereira, F. C. (2007). "Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: A Conceptual Blending Approach". Applications of Cognitive Linguistics series, Mouton de Gruyter. *Veale, T. (2012). "Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity". Bloomsbury Academic, London. *McCormack, J. and d'Inverno, M. (eds.) (2012). "Computers and Creativity". Springer, Berlin. *Veale, T., Feyaerts, K. and Forceville, C. (2013). "Creativity and the Agile Mind: A Multidisciplinary study of a Multifaceted phenomenon". Mouton de Gruyter. * du Sautoy. M. (2019). "The Creativity Code". 4th Estate London. . In addition to the proceedings of conferences and workshops, the computational creativity community has thus far produced these special journal issues dedicated to the topic: *''New Generation Computing'', volume 24, issue 3, 2006 *''Journal of Knowledge-Based Systems'', volume 19, issue 7, November 2006 *''AI Magazine'', volume 30, number 3, Fall 2009 *''Minds and Machines'', volume 20, number 4, November 2010 *''Cognitive Computation'', volume 4, issue 3, September 2012 *''AIEDAM'', volume 27, number 4, Fall 2013 *''Computers in Entertainment'', two special issues on Music Meta-Creation (MuMe), Fall 2016 Additionally, a new journal has started which focuses on computational creativity within the field of music: *JCMS 2016, ''Journal of Creative Music Systems''


See also

*''
1 the Road ''1 the Road'' is an experimental novel composed by artificial intelligence (AI). Emulating Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'', Ross Goodwin drove from New York to New Orleans in March 2017 with an AI in a laptop hooked up to various sensors, whose ...
'' (1st novel) *
Artificial imagination Artificial imagination, also called synthetic imagination or machine imagination, is defined as the artificial simulation of human imagination by general or special purpose computers or artificial neural networks. The applied form of it is known ...
*
Algorithmic art Algorithmic art or algorithm art is art, mostly visual art, in which the design is generated by an algorithm. Algorithmic artists are sometimes called ''algorists''. Overview Algorithmic art, also known as computer-generated art, is a subset o ...
*
Algorithmic composition Algorithmic composition is the technique of using algorithms to create music. Algorithms (or, at the very least, formal sets of rules) have been used to compose music for centuries; the procedures used to plot voice-leading in Western counterpo ...
*
Applications of artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in applications to alleviate certain problems throughout industry and academia. AI, like electricity or computers, is a general purpose technology that has a multitude of applications. It has been used ...
*
Computer art Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many tradit ...
* Creative computing *
Digital morphogenesis Digital morphogenesis is a type of generative art in which complex shape development, or morphogenesis, is enabled by computation. This concept is applicable in many areas of design, art, architecture, and modeling. The concept was originally deve ...
*
Digital poetry Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in c ...
* Generative systems *
Intrinsic motivation (artificial intelligence) Intrinsic motivation in the study of artificial intelligence and robotics is a mechanism for enabling artificial agents (including robots) to exhibit inherently rewarding behaviours such as exploration and curiosity, grouped under the same term i ...
* Musikalisches Würfelspiel (Musical dice game) *
Procedural generation In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In ...
; Lists * List of emerging technologies *
Outline of artificial intelligence The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to artificial intelligence: Artificial intelligence (AI) – intelligence exhibited by machines or software. It is also the name of the scientific field which studies how to ...


References


Further reading


An Overview of Artificial Creativity
on Think Artificial * Cohen, H.

SEHR, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the Mind, 1995 * Plotkin, R. "The Genie in the Machine"


External links

{{commons category, Computational creativity ;Documentaries
Noorderlicht: Margaret Boden and Stephen Thaler on Creative Computers
on
Archive.org The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

In Its Image
on
Archive.org The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
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