Creativity & Intelligence

Can Computers be Creative? How?

How can [a creative idea] arise, then, if not by magic? And how can one impossible idea be more surprising, more creative, than another? How can creativity happen?

- from Margaret Boden's Creativity and Unpredictability

Cognitive Science
Related topics: Art, Problem Solving

Contents

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Good Starting Places

Publication

Creativity at the Metalevel: AAAI-2000 Presidential Address

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

Source

By Bruce G. Buchanan, 2001
presidential address
Publication

The Mechanics of Creativity

"Our goal is to come up with an algorithmic definition of creativity, a set of processes and steps that can account for the kind of creative thinking that we observe in people. Although the idea of a human or machine exhibiting creativity by following a set of rules seems on the face to be a contradiction, this is not necessarily so."

Source

By Roger Schank and Christopher Owens, 1990
Publication

How to draw three people in a botanical garden

AARON is a program designed to investigate the cognitive principles underlying visual representation. Under continuous development for fifteen years, it is now able autonomously to make "freehand" drawings of people in garden-like settings. This has required a complex interplay between two bodies of knowledge: object-specific knowledge of how people are constructed and how they move, together with morphological knowledge of plant growth: and procedural knowledge of representational strategy.

Source

By Cohen, Harold, 1988
Aaron, classic
Publication

Off the shelf

I write programs which are intended to throw some light upon what people do, in a cognitive sense, when they make images: not upon what their images look like. Art is a series of acts, not a series of objects. From which it follows that nobody ever made original art - with or without a computer - by mimicking the appearances of existing original art.

Source

By Cohen, Harold, 1986
Aaron

General Readings

AI in the News

How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?

My most astonishing discovery came at Carnegie Mellon University, where Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell have been using real-time functional MRI scanners to do some actual mind reading---or thought recognition, as they more responsibly call it.

As I lay in the fMRI, I saw 20 images on the screen (of a strawberry, skyscraper, cave, and so on). I was instructed to imagine the qualities of each object. The computer would try to figure out, from every two objects, the sequence of the two images I had just seen (whether strawberry had come before skyscraper, for example). It got them 100 percent right.

Source

Nov 20 2012, By Pogue, David
CMU, Mitchell
AI in the News

How Robots Saved an Artist's Sanity

[Patrick] Tresset's robots use computer vision to identify their subjects---they can recognize faces---and then they spend about 30 minutes on each portrait. (One of his earlier-generation robots, Pete, will actually doodle when there are no faces in sight to draw.) The early versions were crude and involved not physical robots but simulated drawing created with computer-aided drafting programs. But over the past 10 years or so, Tresset and Frederic Fol Leymarie, his co-director at the Aikon project at Goldsmiths University of London, have made tremendous progress.

Source

Nov 15 2012, By Bosch, Torie
art
Video

Does Our Future Require Us to Go Back to Nature?: Ashok K. Goel at TEDxPeachtree 2012

Ashok Goel challenges well-worn notions of design and creativity and makes a powerful case for bio-inspired design wherein nature serves as the ultimate inspiration for design innovation and sustainability.

Source

Nov 12 2012, By Goel, A., 21 min
TED, lecture
AI in the News

BYU PhD student creates computer that composes music

When BYU PhD candidate Kristine Monteith was sitting in natural language processing class, it wasn't letter sequences going through her head but music notes. The Utah State graduate in music therapy pursuing her PhD in computer at BYU decided to apply her right and left brain abilities to combine music and computer science. She invented a computer program that can compose original music that evokes emotions humans can relate with, even though it was generated from a machine. In the survey she performed for that, she found that 54 percent of listeners could identify the emotions in computer-generated music, while for the human-composed music, only 43 percent could identify the emotions in the melodies.

Source

Oct 16 2011
Publication

Colouring Without Seeing: A Problem in Machine Creativity

 Just one of the many papers available in this collection of papers by Harold Cohen, creator of Aaron, the painter.

Source

By Cohen, Harold, 1999
Aaron, painting
Publication

Creativity and Unpredictability

A scientific account of creativity is possible only if the ideas conveyed metaphorically in Section II can be clearly expressed.... One way in which this can be done is to use the methods of artificial intelligence (AI), in which conceptual spaces can be mapped and explored, and sometimes transformed.

Source

By Boden, M. A., 1995

News

AI in the News

A Point of View: Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence

An 18th Century automaton that could beat human chess opponents seemingly marked the arrival of artificial intelligence. But what turned out to be an elaborate hoax had its own sense of genius, says Adam Gopnik.

...So the inventor's real genius was not to build a chess-playing machine. It was to be the first to notice that, in the modern world, there is more mastery available than you might think; that exceptional talent is usually available, and will often work cheap.

Source

Mar 22 2013, By Gopnik, Adam
Turk
The Turk
AI in the News

How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?

My most astonishing discovery came at Carnegie Mellon University, where Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell have been using real-time functional MRI scanners to do some actual mind reading---or thought recognition, as they more responsibly call it.

As I lay in the fMRI, I saw 20 images on the screen (of a strawberry, skyscraper, cave, and so on). I was instructed to imagine the qualities of each object. The computer would try to figure out, from every two objects, the sequence of the two images I had just seen (whether strawberry had come before skyscraper, for example). It got them 100 percent right.

Source

Nov 20 2012, By Pogue, David
CMU, Mitchell
AI in the News

How Robots Saved an Artist's Sanity

[Patrick] Tresset's robots use computer vision to identify their subjects---they can recognize faces---and then they spend about 30 minutes on each portrait. (One of his earlier-generation robots, Pete, will actually doodle when there are no faces in sight to draw.) The early versions were crude and involved not physical robots but simulated drawing created with computer-aided drafting programs. But over the past 10 years or so, Tresset and Frederic Fol Leymarie, his co-director at the Aikon project at Goldsmiths University of London, have made tremendous progress.

Source

Nov 15 2012, By Bosch, Torie
art
AI in the News

BYU PhD student creates computer that composes music

When BYU PhD candidate Kristine Monteith was sitting in natural language processing class, it wasn't letter sequences going through her head but music notes. The Utah State graduate in music therapy pursuing her PhD in computer at BYU decided to apply her right and left brain abilities to combine music and computer science. She invented a computer program that can compose original music that evokes emotions humans can relate with, even though it was generated from a machine. In the survey she performed for that, she found that 54 percent of listeners could identify the emotions in computer-generated music, while for the human-composed music, only 43 percent could identify the emotions in the melodies.

Source

Oct 16 2011

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