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Computational creativity

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, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and the arts (e.g., computational art as part of computational culture).

Not to be confused with Creative computing.

The goal of computational creativity is to model, simulate or replicate creativity using a computer, to achieve one of several ends:[1]


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[edit]

Theoretical approaches concern the essence of creativity. Especially, under what circumstances it is possible to call the model a "creative" if eminent creativity is about rule-breaking or the disavowal of convention. This is a variant of Ada Lovelace's objection to machine intelligence, as recapitulated by modern theorists such as Teresa Amabile.[2] 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[3]—a key point in favor of computational creativity.

Placing a familiar object in an unfamiliar setting (e.g., 's Fountain) or an unfamiliar object in a familiar setting (e.g., a fish-out-of-water story such as The Beverly Hillbillies)

Marcel Duchamp

Blending two superficially different objects or genres (e.g., a sci-fi story set in the , with robot cowboys, as in Westworld, or the reverse, as in Firefly; Japanese haiku poems, etc.)

Wild West

Comparing a familiar object to a superficially unrelated and semantically distant concept (e.g., "Makeup is the Western "; "A zoo is a gallery with living exhibits")

burka

Adding a new and unexpected feature to an existing concept (e.g., adding a to a Swiss Army knife; adding a camera to a mobile phone)

scalpel

Compressing two incongruous scenarios into the same narrative to get a joke (e.g., the joke "Women are always using men to advance their careers. Damned anthropologists!")

Emo Philips

Using an iconic image from one domain in a domain for an unrelated or incongruous idea or product (e.g., using the image to sell cars, or to advertise the dangers of smoking-related impotence).

Marlboro Man

Visual and artistic creativity[edit]

Computational creativity in the generation of visual art 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,[60] 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.[61] 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 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.[62] 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 games. 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.[63] 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.[64]


In July 2015, Google released DeepDream – an open source[65] 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, thus creating a dreamlike psychedelic appearance in the deliberately over-processed images.[66][67][68]


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 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.[69][70][71][72]


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.[73] 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.[74]

Creativity in problem solving[edit]

Creativity is also useful in allowing for unusual solutions in problem solving. In psychology and cognitive science, this research area is called creative problem solving. 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 in problem solving.[75] The emphasis of this computational creativity project is not on performance per se (as in artificial intelligence 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[edit]

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.

ICCC 2023: University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada

ICCC 2022: Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

ICCC 2021: Mexico City, Mexico (Virtual due to )

COVID-19 pandemic

ICCC 2020, Coimbra, Portugal (Virtual due to )[79]

COVID-19 pandemic

ICCC 2019, Charlotte, North Carolina, US

[80]

ICCC 2018, Salamanca, Spain

ICCC 2017, Atlanta, Georgia, US

ICCC 2016, Paris, France

ICCC 2015, Park City, Utah, US. 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

The International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) occurs annually, organized by The Association for Computational Creativity.[78] Events in the series include:


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:


The 1st Conference on Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity will be held

(1st novel)

1 the Road

Artificial imagination

Algorithmic art

Algorithmic composition

Applications of artificial intelligence

Computer art

Creative computing

Digital morphogenesis

Digital poetry

Generative systems

Intrinsic motivation (artificial intelligence)

(Musical dice game)

Musikalisches Würfelspiel

Procedural generation

Archived 2008-03-25 at the Wayback Machine on Think Artificial

An Overview of Artificial Creativity

Cohen, H., Archived 2008-04-19 at the Wayback Machine, SEHR, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the Mind, 1995

"the further exploits of AARON, Painter"

on Archive.org

Noorderlicht: Margaret Boden and Stephen Thaler on Creative Computers

on Archive.org

In Its Image