Elements of Scientific Creativity

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity

Volume

Papers from the 1993 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

This paper examines the elements of scientific creativity through a series of basic cognitive and computational concepts. Scientific creativity requires motivation, an access to a body of systematic knowledge, an ability to correctly formulate research problems and to define a comprehensive problem space. It also requires an ability to reduce the corresponding search space by using methodological knowledge, and rigour to conduct search in the constrained search space. The paper discusses the types and the role of knowledge involved in scientific research, types of scientific creativity, and the dimensions of scientific research.