Computational creativity - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Computational creativity (also known as artificial creativity, mechanical creativity or creative computation) is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

, cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....

, philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, and the arts.

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
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...

or computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

capable of human-level creativity
Creativity
Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...
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.

Theoretical issues

As measured by the amount of activity in the field (e.g., publications, conferences and workshops), computational creativity is a growing area of research. But the field is still hampered by a number of fundamental problems:

Creativity is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to define in objective terms.
Creativity takes many forms in human activity, some eminent (meaning "recognized" or "ingenious", e.g., Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...

's creativity; sometimes referred to as "Creativity" with a capital C) and some mundane.

Creativity can mean different things in different contexts: Is it a state of mind, a talent or ability, or a process? Does it describe a person, an activity or an end-product? Can collaborative work in which exceptional products emerge from simple interactions be considered creative?

These are problems that complicate the study of creativity in general, but certain problems attach themselves specifically to computational creativity:

Can creativity be hard-wired? In existing systems to which creativity is attributed, is the creativity that of the system or that of the system's programmer or designer?
How do we evaluate computational creativity? What counts as creativity in a computational system? Are natural language
Natural language processing
Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

generation systems creative? Are machine translation
Machine translation
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

systems creative? What distinguishes research in computational creativity from research in artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

generally?
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 the Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace , born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine...

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?

Defining creativity in computational terms

Since 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

Notice how these criteria touch on many of the stereotypical themes that are typically associated with creativity: newness and value (1), transformation and revolution (2), passion and drive (3), vision and insight (4). These four criteria also combine elements of the producer-perspective and the product-perspective described earlier: criterion (1) characterizes the two most important qualities of a creative product, while criteria (2) – (4) characterize the attitude and actions of the producer of such a product. A given product may satisfy all or none of these criteria, but we should expect products that exhibit all four to be widely perceived as creative, while products that exhibit just some of these criteria will be judged with greater subjectivity and variation. Though no criterion is likely to be either necessary or sufficient, criterion (1) is perhaps the most common hallmark of creativity and thus serves to anchor the others. From a computational perspective, then, one can consider (1) to be a must-have feature, and (2) – (4) as desirable extras.

Newell and Simon are best known for their contribution to the search-in-a-state-space paradigm of AI, sometimes caricatured as Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI

GOFAI

In artificial intelligence research, GOFAI describes the oldest original approach to achieving artificial intelligence, based on logic and problem solving...

), and it is interesting to consider how the GOFAI paradigm can incorporate these criteria. From a search perspective, criterion (1) characterizes the goal or end-state of a computational search, criterion (4) characterizes the starting state from which the search is launched, criterion (3) characterizes the scale of the search, suggesting that many dead-ends are likely to be encountered, while criterion (2) suggests that well-worn pathways through the search space are best avoided if a creative end-state is to be reached.

Key ideas

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

P-creativity and H-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").

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 Newell and Simon’s criteria, 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 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 are 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
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

's Fountain
Fountain (Duchamp)
Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades. In such pieces he made use of an already existing object. In this case Duchamp used a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed "R. Mutt". Readymades also go by the term Found object...

) or an unfamiliar object in a familiar setting (e.g., a fish-out-of-water story such as The Beverly Hillbillies
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Beverly Hillbillies is an American situation comedy originally broadcast for nine seasons on CBS from 1962 to 1971, starring Buddy Ebsen, Irene Ryan, Donna Douglas, and Max Baer, Jr....

)
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
Westworld is a 1973 science fiction-thriller film written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton and produced by Paul Lazarus III. It stars Yul Brynner as a lifelike robot in a futuristic Western-themed amusement park, and Richard Benjamin and James Brolin as guests of the park.Westworld was the...

, or the reverse, as in Firefly
Firefly (TV series)
Firefly is an American space western television series created by writer and director Joss Whedon, under his Mutant Enemy Productions label. Whedon served as executive producer, along with Tim Minear....

; Japanese haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...

poems, etc.)
Comparing a familiar object to a superficially unrelated and semantically distant concept (e.g., "Makeup is the Western burka
Burka
A burka is a dress made from felt or karakul . Karakul being quite expensive, burkas were usually sewn from felt treated to look like karakul...

"; "A zoo
Zoo
A zoological garden, zoological park, menagerie, or zoo is a facility in which animals are confined within enclosures, displayed to the public, and in which they may also be bred....

is a gallery with living exhibits")
Adding a new and unexpected feature to an existing concept (e.g., adding a scalpel
Scalpel
A scalpel, or lancet, is a small and extremely sharp bladed instrument used for surgery, anatomical dissection, and various arts and crafts . Scalpels may be single-use disposable or re-usable. Re-usable scalpels can have attached, resharpenable blades or, more commonly, non-attached, replaceable...

to a Swiss Army knife
Swiss Army knife
The Swiss Army knife is a brand of pocket knife or multi-tool manufactured by Victorinox AG and Wenger SA. The term "Swiss Army knife" was coined by US soldiers after World War II due to the difficulty they had in pronouncing the German name....

; adding a camera
Camera phone
A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture still photographs . Since early in the 21st century the majority of mobile phones in use are camera phones....

to a mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

)
Compressing two incongruous scenarios into the same narrative to get a joke (e.g., the Emo Philips
Emo Philips
Emo Philips is an American entertainer and comedian born in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove. Much of his standup comedy stems from the use of paraprosdokians and garden path sentences spoken in a wandering falsetto tone of voice and a confused, childlike delivery of his material to produce the...

joke “Women are always using me 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
Marlboro Man
The Marlboro Man is a figure used in tobacco advertising campaign 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. The image involves a rugged cowboy or cowboys, in nature with...

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 algorithm

Genetic algorithm

A genetic algorithm is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural evolution. This heuristic is routinely used to generate useful solutions to optimization and search problems...

s and neural network

Neural network

The term neural network was traditionally used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes...

s can be used to generate blended or crossover representations that capture a combination of different inputs.

Bisociation

Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...

proposes a very general model of creative combination in his 1964 book The Act of Creation, claiming that scientific discovery, art and humour are all linked by a common mechanism called "bisociation". Koestler lacked a formal, computational vocabulary for describing bisociation, which he defined as a reconciliation of two orthogonal matrices of thought (conceptual structures, mental space

Mental space

The Mental space is a theoretic construct proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Armen Khederlarian corresponding to possible worlds in Philosophy. The main difference between a mental space and a possible world is that a mental space does not contain a faithful representation of reality, but an...

s).

Conceptual blending

Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier propose a model called Conceptual Integration Networks that elaborates upon the ideas of Koestler by synthesizing ideas from Cognitive Linguistic research into mental space

Mental space

s and conceptual metaphors. 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.

Blending theory is an elaborate framework that provides a rich terminology for describing the products of creative thinking, from metaphors to jokes to neologisms to adverts. It is most typically applied retrospectively, to describe how a blended conceptual structure could have arisen from a particular pair of input structures. These conceptual structures are often good examples of human creativity, but blending theory is not a theory of creativity, nor – despite its authors’ claims – does it describe a mechanism for creativity. The theory lacks an explanation for how a creative individual chooses the input spaces that should be blended to generate a desired result.

Nonetheless, 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. More recently, Francisco Câmara Pereira presented an implementation of blending theory that employs ideas both from GOFAI

GOFAI

In artificial intelligence research, GOFAI describes the oldest original approach to achieving artificial intelligence, based on logic and problem solving...

and from genetic algorithms 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

Pun

The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...

s, neologisms, rhyme

Rhyme

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...

s, allusion

Allusion

An allusion is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, people, places, events, literary work, myths, or works of art, either directly or by implication. M. H...

s, sarcasm

Sarcasm

Sarcasm is “a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter jibe or taunt.” Though irony and understatement is usually the immediate context, most authorities distinguish sarcasm from irony; however, others argue that sarcasm may or often does involve irony or employs...

, irony

Irony

Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

, simile

Simile

A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two different things, usually by employing the words "like", "as". Even though both similes and metaphors are forms of comparison, similes indirectly compare the two ideas and allow them to remain distinct in spite of their similarities, whereas...

s, metaphor

Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

s, analogies

Analogy

Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...

, witticisms, and joke

Joke

A joke is a phrase or a paragraph with a humorous twist. It can be in many different forms, such as a question or short story. To achieve this end, jokes may employ irony, sarcasm, word play and other devices...

s. Native speakers of morphologically rich languages (including all Slavic languages

Slavic languages

The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...

) frequently create new word-forms that are easily understood, although they will never find their way to the dictionary. The area of natural language

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

generation has been well studied, but these creative aspects of everyday language have yet to be incorporated with any robustness or scale.

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 basis 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.

The company Narrative Science makes computer generated news and reports commercially available, including summarizing team sporting events based on statistical data from the game. It also creates financial reports and real estate analyses.

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, 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

Bowling ball

A bowling ball is a spherical ball made from plastic, reactive resin, urethane or a combination of these materials which is used in the sport of bowling. Ten-pin bowling balls generally have a set of three holes drilled in them, one each for the ring and middle finger, and one for the thumb;...

", "as pleasant as a root canal

Endodontic therapy

Endodontic therapy is a sequence of treatment for the pulp of a tooth which results in the elimination of infection and protection of the decontaminated tooth from future microbial invasion...

"); 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

Whippet

The Whippet is a breed of dog in the sighthound family. They are active and playful and are physically similar to a small Greyhound.- Description :...

”, “rope”, “stick-insect

Phasmatodea

The Phasmatodea are an order of insects, whose members are variously known as stick insects , walking sticks or stick-bugs , phasmids, ghost insects and leaf insects...

” 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 Gentner

Dedre Gentner is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. She is a prominent researcher in the study of analogical reasoning. Her work on structure-mapping theory was foundational for the development of the structure mapping engine by Ken Forbus...

. views analogy as a structure-preserving process; this view has been implemented in the structure mapping engine

Structure Mapping Engine

In artificial intelligence and cognitive science, the structure mapping engine is an implementation in software of an algorithm for analogical matching based on the psychological theory of Dedre Gentner [1983]. The basis of Gentner's structure-mapping idea is that an analogy is a mapping of...

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

Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...

, Paul Thagard, and Keith Holyoak

Keith Holyoak

Keith James Holyoak is a researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on human thinking and reasoning. Holyoak's work focuses on the role of analogy in thinking...

. Also worthy of note here is Peter Turney and Michael Littman's machine learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

approach to the solving of SAT

SAT

The SAT Reasoning Test is a standardized test for college admissions in the United States. The SAT is owned, published, and developed by the College Board, a nonprofit organization in the United States. It was formerly developed, published, and scored by the Educational Testing Service which still...

-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

Jape is a configurable, graphical proof assistant, originally developed at the University of Oxford. It allows user to define a logic, decide how to view proofs, and much more...

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.

Neologisms

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

Portmanteau word

A portmanteau or portmanteau word is a blend of two words or morphemes into one new word. A portmanteau word typically combines both sounds and meanings, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog. More generally, it may refer to any term or phrase that combines two or more meanings...

s" (after Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

). Tony Veale has developed a system called ZeitGeist that harvests neological headword

Headword

A headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appear. The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position...

s from Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

and interprets them relative to their local context in Wikipedia and relative to specific word senses in WordNet

WordNet

WordNet is a lexical database for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets...

. 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 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. Neurolinguistic

Neurolinguistics

Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methodology and theory from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science,...

inspirations have been used to analyze the process of novel word creation in the brain, understand neurocognitive processes responsible for intuition, insight, imagination and creativity and to create a server that invents novel names for products, based on their description.

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

Case-based reasoning

Case-based reasoning , broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems. An auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalling another car that exhibited similar symptoms is using case-based reasoning...

(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

Meter (poetry)

In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...

rules are then used to combine these fragments into a well-formed poetic structure. Example software projects include:

Racter
Racter
Racter was an artificial intelligence computer program that generated English language prose at random.-History:The name of the program is short for raconteur. The sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated, as could be seen by investigation of the template system of text...
Flowerewolf automatic poetry generator

And poetry collections include:

The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed

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

Bạch

Bạch is a Vietnamese surname. The name is transliterated as Bai in Chinese and Baek, in Korean.Bach is the anglicized variation of the surname Bạch.-Notable people with the surname Bạch:* Bạch Liêu...

) and jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

. Most notably, David Cope

David Cope

David Cope is an American author, composer, scientist, and professor emeritus of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz...

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.

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.

Visual and artistic creativity

Computational creativity in the generation of visual art has had some notable successes in the creation of both abstract art and representational art. The most famous program in this domain is Harold Cohen

Harold Cohen (artist)

Harold Cohen is a British-born artist who is noted as the creator of AARON-External links:*...

's AARON

AARON

AARON is a software program written by artist Harold Cohen that creates original artistic images.Proceeding from Cohen's initial question "What are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks functions as an image?", AARON has been in continual development since 1973...

, 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

Simon Colton

Simon Colton is a British computer scientist, currently working in the Computational Creativity Group at Imperial College London, where he holds the position of Reader. He graduated from the University of Durham with a degree in Mathematics, gained a MSc...

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 as questions about the extent of, or lack of, creativity in a computational art system. Nonetheless, in more recent work, The Painting Fool has been extended to create novel images, much as AARON

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.

Creativity in problem solving

Creativity is also useful in allowing for unusual solutions in problem solving

Problem solving

Problem solving is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping. Consideredthe most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of...

. In psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

and cognitive science

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

, this research area is called creative problem solving

Creative problem solving

Creative problem solving is the mental process of creating a solution to a problem. It is a special form of problem solving in which the solution is independently created rather than learned with assistance.Creative problem solving always involves creativity....

. The Explicit-Implicit Interaction (EII) theory of creativity has recently been implemented using a CLARION

CLARION (cognitive architecture)

Connectionist Learning with Adaptive Rule Induction ON-line is a cognitive architecture that incorporates the distinction between implicit and explicit processes and focuses on capturing the interaction between these two types of processes. By focusing on this distinction, CLARION has been used to...

-based computational model that allows for the simulation of incubation

Incubation (psychology)

Incubation is one of the 4 proposed stages of creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Incubation is defined as a process of unconscious recombination of thought elements that were stimulated through conscious work at one point in time, resulting in novel ideas at some...

and insight

Insight

Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context. Insight can be used with several related meanings:*a piece of information...

in problem solving. The emphasis of this computational creativity project is not on performance per se (as in artificial intelligence

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.

Events

The International Conference on Computational Creativity occurs annually. The next conference is May 30 - June 1, 2012 in Dublin, Ireland. Previous conferences have been in Mexico City, Mexico (2011) and Lisbon, Portugal (2010). 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 steering committee for these events comprises the following researchers:

Amílcar Cardoso, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Simon Colton, Imperial College London, UK
Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Nick Montfort, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alison Pease, University of Edinburgh, UK
Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Autonomous Metropolitan University, México
Graeme Ritchie, University of Aberdeen, UK
Rob Saunders, University of Sydney, Australia
Dan Ventura, Brigham Young University, USA
Tony Veale, University College, Dublin, Eire
Geraint A. Wiggins, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Publication forums

In addition to the proceedings of these workshops, the computational creativity community has thus far produced two special journal issues dedicated to the topic:

Journal of Knowledge-Based Systems, volume 9, issue 7, November 2006
New Generation Computing, volume 24, issue 3, 2006

Theoretical issues

Defining creativity in computational terms

Key ideas

P-creativity and H-creativity

Exploratory and transformational creativity

Generation and evaluation

Combinatorial creativity

Bisociation

Conceptual blending

Linguistic creativity

Story generation

Metaphor and simile

Analogy

Joke generation

Neologisms

Poetry

Musical creativity

Visual and artistic creativity

Creativity in problem solving

Events

Publication forums

See also

External links