The Computational Creativity Complex - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 80

Fig. 4.7 Possible logical overview of a creative agent . The component internal mechanisms are
meant to be representative rather than exhaustive. In the same spirit, no attempt here is made to
accurately visualize the dependencies and communication between these mechanisms. The agent
(potentially) communicates with the environment in several ways, represented by labeled arrows
entering or leaving the agent
4.3.2 The Creativity “Algorithm”
Because there is not even an agreed upon definition for creativity (and very likely
never will be), there does not exist a generally accepted canonical “algorithm” for
creativity. As a surrogate for such an “algorithm”, we will employ five general steps
distilled by Csikszentmihalyi [ 40 ]:
1. preparation
2. incubation
3. insight
4. evaluation
5. elaboration
In what follows we will discuss each of these steps in the context of computability.
Note that, as Csikszentmihalyi observes, these steps should not be taken as a single-
iteration process but rather as parts of a multiple-iteration, possibly recursive process
in which the steps may be revisited multiple times, in varying order as necessary.
Here, we will ignore this obviously important issue of flow control and focus only
on the five steps. In what follows we will consider the archetype agent of Fig. 4.7
whose ambition is creativity, and we will consider how that agent might follow
Csikszentmihalyi's archetypal “algorithm” for being so.