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Good Starting PlacesDREAM-LOGIC, THE INTERNET AND ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT by David Gelernter. (June 22, 2010). This is the second in a series of essays by Gelernter commissioned by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The German translation was published on June 22nd ("Ein Geist aus Software"). "...in approaching the topic of human thought, we usually stop half-way through. In fact, the human mind moves back and forth along a spectrum defined by ordinary logic at one end and "dream logic" at the other. "Dream logic" makes just as much sense as ordinary "day logic"; it simply follows different rules. ... Creativity doesn't operate when your focus is high; only when your thoughts have started to drift is creativity possible. We find creative solutions to a problem when it lingers at the back of our minds, not when it monopolizes attention by standing at the front." AI Magazine Special Issue on Creativity. (Fall, 2009). Vol 30, No 3. (Go to page for article and click on "Download PDF file".) Artificial Genius. By Margaret A. Boden. Discover Magazine. (October 1996). "Since the early 1980s, dozens of people have tried to plumb the potential of computers to make supplemental contributions to their paintings, writings, and musical compositions, or even to make wholly original works of art. Partly owing to the growth in speed and power of computers, which can be programmed to behave in ever more complex ways, these artists have largely succeeded in endowing machines with what seems to be the gift of creativity--computer programs can now compose original music in the style of Bach, play jazz saxophone like Charlie Parker, and even produce works that arguably bear their own style (or at least one that cannot be directly traced to the programmer-artist). But can a bucket of bolts and silicon chips ever truly be creative? " Creativity at the Meta Level. Bruce Buchanan's Presidential Address at AAAI-2000. The address and the accompanying sides can be accessed from AAAI's collection of Presidential Addresses. The address also appears in AI Magazine 22(3): Fall 2001, 13-28. Creative Solutions to Problems. By John McCarthy (1999). "The idea is to chip a piece out of the problem of creativity by defining a creative solution to a problem relative to the functions and predicates used in posing the problem. The simplification comes from not talking about the creativity of the problem solver but only about the creativity of the solution." General ReadingsCreativity and Unpredictability. By Margaret Boden. From Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities: A special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review [Volume 4, issue 2; Spring 1995] edited by Stefano Franchi and Guven Guzeldere. "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."
Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, a Storytelling Machine (1999). By Selmer Bringsjord David Ferrucci. The Preface is available online via a link from Selmer Bringsjord's web site. Proceeings of the Fourth Symposium on Creativity in AI and Cognitive Science. AISB-2002. Amilcar Cardoso and Geraint A. Wiggins, editors. One of the many convention proceedings available from The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB). Computational Creativity By Simon Colton. AISB Quarterly, No. 126, Spring 2008, pp 6-7. Downloadable PDF file - skip to p.6. (If not successful, go to AISB Archive and find vol. 126.) "...research into computational creativity has lagged behind other areas of AI research a little. However, there is a small band of us who pursue the goal of getting computer programs to creatively produce poems, sonatas,paintings, theorems, jokes, and much more. We’ve recently reached the stage where there is a sufficiently large number of such programs for us to be able to compare and contrast them in a meaningful way. This has enabled us to begin to come to consensus about the main issues in computational creativity." The Effect of Input Knowledge on Creativity. By S. Colton, A. Pease and G. Ritchie (November 2001). Division of Informations at The University of Edinburgh. "Recently, many programs have been written to perform tasks which are usually regarded as requiring creativity in humans. We can derive some commonalities between these programs in order to build further creative programs." Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Papers from the 1993 Spring Symposium, (1993)ed. Terry Dartnall and Steven Kim. Technical Report SS-93-01. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, California. The Creativity Machine By Bob Holmes. New Scientist, (January 20, 1996). Available to subscribers or for a fee. "It writes music, invents soft drinks and dreams up hard materials. The man who built it points the way to immortality says Bob Holmes." John Koza Has Built An Invention Machine - Its creations earn patents, outperform humans, and will soon fly to space. All it needs now is a few worthy challenges. By Jonathon Keats. Popular Science (April 19, 2006). "John Holland has lately been researching what such ingenuity might tell us about the creative process in humans. He believes that revolutionary ideas don’t come at random but are 'new combinations of fairly standard parts with which we’re already familiar.' He cites as examples the internal combustion engine and the airplane, for which all the components were available long before the invention came along, lacking only someone with adequately broad knowledge, deep resources and the temperament to combine them." If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an Artist? By Dylan Loeb McClain. The New York Times (January 25, 2003; no fee reg. req'd). "But if computers become better than humans at chess, does that mean that computers are being artistic or that chess is essentially a complicated puzzle? ... Chess is not the only field where computers have achieved success formerly thought to be achievable only through human creativity. In 1997, six months after the victory by Deep Blue, a competition was held at Stanford University between a human and a computer to see which could compose music in the style of Bach. The computer won." Assessing Creativity. By Graeme Ritchie (April 2001). Division of Informations at The University of Edinburgh. " In exploring the question of whether a computer program is behaving creatively, it is important to be explicit, and if possible formal, about the criteria that are being applied in making judgements of creativity." The Mechanics of Creativity. By Roger Schank and Christopher Owens. From Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). "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." Related ResourcesSee articles on Aaron, the program written by Harold Cohen that paints original art. Creative Agents Project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science. "Deep Blue is an intelligent agent; no question about that. But is Deep Blue creative? Probably not: it cranks away, searching mindlessly and inescapably within a framework given to it by some rather ingenious humans. In many ways Deep Blue is no more creative than a conventional calculator. The Creative Agents project aims at building genuinely creative agents that will be of interest to not only researchers within AI and Cog Sci, but also to companies who would be able to profit from the deployment of such agents amongst their workforces."
"The SWALE project [conducted by Alex Kass, David Leake, and Chris Owens, advised by Roger Schank and Chris Riesbeck] explores case-based reasoning (CBR) as a basis for creativity. In the CBR model of creativity, creativity comes from retrieving knowledge that is not routinely applied to a situation, and using it in a new way. In this view, the key issues for creativity are how to retrieve appropriate knowledge for novel uses and how to adapt it to fit novel circumstances. Depending on the retrieval and adaptation processes used, CBR can provide solutions anywhere along a spectrum of creativity, ranging from straightforward reapplications of old knowledge all the way to highly novel views." Related AITopics Pages
Other References OfflineMargaret A. Boden (1998). Creativity and Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 103(1-2): 347-356 (1998). Margaret Boden (2006). AUTHENTICITY AND COMPUTER ART rom Ch. 13 of Boden, M. A. (2006), Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford: OUP/Clarendon Press). Thoughtful discussion of David Cope's EMMY program for music composition, and issues of creativity in general. Downloadable PDF file at www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/courses/creative-systems/papers/maggie/authenticity.pdf Herbert Simon: interviewed June 1994, by Doug Stewart. Omni Magazine. "Is creativity anything more than problem-solving? Simon: I don't think so. What's involved in being creative? The ability to make selective searches. For that, you first need knowledge and then the ability to recognize cues indexed to that knowledge in particular situations. That lets you pull out the right knowledge at the right time. The systems we built to simulate scientific or any kind of creativity are based on those principles." [No longer available online.] |
