How Models of Creativity and Analogy Need to Answer the Tailorability Concern - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 90

Chapter 5
How Models of Creativity and Analogy Need
to Answer the Tailorability Concern

John Licato, Selmer Bringsjord and Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu

Abstract Analogy is a major component of human creativity. Tasks from the ability
to generate new stories to the ability to create new and insightful mathematical
theorems can be shown to at least partially be explainable in terms of analogical
processes. Artificial creativity and AGI systems, then, require powerful analogical
subsystems—or so we will soon briefly argue. It quickly becomes obvious that a
roadblock to such a use for analogical systems is a common critique that currently
applies to every one in existence: the so-called “Tailorability Concern” (TC). Unfor-
tunately, TC currently lacks a canonical formalization, and as a result the precise
conditions that must be satisfied by an analogical system intended to answer TC are
unclear. We remedy this problem by developing a still-informal but clear formula-
tion of what it means to successfully answer TC, and offer guidelines for analogical
systems that hope to progress further toward AGI.

5.1 Introduction

Creativity and the ability to reason analogically have a strong relationship
[ 18 , 19 , 23 , 28 ]. For example, many of the greatest lines in literature make use
of familiar analogical processes: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”
[ 41 ] makes sense if that rose and its name are understood to correspond to Romeo
and his given name (analogical mapping). The subsequent analogical inference is
that just as the nature of the rose is independent of its name, so is Romeo's nature
independent of his.
Even if one believes that overuse of analogy can be harmful to creative thought
[ 39 ], many researchers argue that the ability to determine analogical similarity is