On the Role of Computers in Creativity-Support Systems - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 115

Perhaps music came naturally to Mozart. In a letter to his father on Nov. 8, 1777,
he wrote: “I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of
speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter.
Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no
dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.” Perhaps one could
say that his brain was structured in a certain way that generated musical patterns
naturally. Of course, what makes his work great is because of the way people have
responded to his music over more than two centuries. (See also [ 37 , 47 ].)
Or consider mentally different people, like the case of Stephen Wiltshire, discussed
in [ 55 ]. Sir Wiltshire has an amazing ability to draw a landscape from memory after
seeing it only once. Though he is diagnosed with autism, his work is highly regarded
both by critics and general population. He was awarded Member of the Order of the
British Empire for services to art in 2006. So he is no doubt a very creative person,
no matter which criterion one chooses to apply.
But let us think about it a minute. What do we mean by saying that he is creative?
His work has a certain style, level of details that most people cannot reach, aesthetic
appeal, and all that. As with Mozart, we can go further and say that perhaps this is
the way he expresses himself naturally: just like you and I might describe what we
did on our last summer vacation, he draws fantastic landscapes.
We can now throw in here examples of people with schizophrenia or brain damage,
savants or manic-depressive people, and so on [ 57 ]. When these people produce work
that is considered creative, often this is their mode of being, and it could not have
been otherwise. (See also [ 1 , 17 ].) Many times the intention is missing as well.
Einstein's brain was preserved after his death so that people can study it to get
any clues about the biological basis for creativity. But it is not like he was creative
every day of his life. It is the impact of his theory of relativity, and its eventual
acceptance by the scientific community that was a key factor in him becoming an
icon of scientific creativity of the twentieth century. Moreover, Einstein was also
dogmatic at times, perhaps the most famous case being his rejection of Alexander
Friedmann's expanding universe hypothesis [ 61 ].
If we were to model Einstein's creative process, what would we model? There
have been some computational models of scientific discovery, but they almost always
greatly simplify the process by putting a number of assumptions in place as to what
is significant and what is not. At that point, it is not clear at all if they are modeling
the actual mental process of the creative person at the time of the creative act. (See
also [ 5 ].)
Such examples suggest that the so-called creative humans use a variety of heuris-
tics, some of them consciously and some subconsciously, for creating artifacts or for
problem solving. Many of these heuristics can be mechanized, and in principle there
seems to be no reason to consider any of them non-algorithmic.
The second characterization of creativity focuses on the nature of creative artifacts.
It takes only the audience's perspective, so the creator is not even mentioned. We
refer to Barthes' [ 3 ] articulation: “We know that to restore to writing its future, we
must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the
Author,” though he traced this view to even earlier scholars. Though not everyone