Towards Game-based Metrics for Computational Co-creativity

Abstract--We propose the following question: what gamelike interactive system would provide a good environment for measuring the impact and success of a co-creative, cooperative agent? Creativity is often formulated in terms of novelty, value, surprise and interestingness. We review how these concepts are measured in current computational intelligence research and provide a mapping from modern electronic and tabletop games to open research problems in mixed-initiative systems and computational co-creativity. We propose application scenarios for future research, and a number of metrics under which the performance of cooperative agents in these environments will be evaluated. I. INTRODUCTION Designing intelligent agents characterized by a co-creative, cooperative behavior would mark a major breakthrough in the age of industrial man-machine interaction. Exchanging relevant information with suitable time frequency and enriching the partner (human or machine) with novel perspectives and solution strategies on the problem are key factors for desirable results (considering the value of the output and the effort required). Cooperative games offer the valuable opportunity to realize an interactive environment for developing and evaluating computational methods used by these agents. In this paper we review concepts and implementations of cooperative games in the light of their capability to impact development processes in (industrial) environments with co-evolution and co-creativity as important expressions for cooperation. Having a working definition of computational creativity, and how creative systems and their outputs are judged in terms of their value, novelty, interestingness, and surprise, will help us understand cooperatively creative agents and might help us build them as well. Computational creativity and AIassisted design are important application areas for computational intelligence techniques such as neural networks, reinforcement learning and evolutionary computation; further, the conceptualization of creativity as search in a design space fits well with design applications of evolutionary computation.