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Chapter 4
The Computational Creativity Complex
Dan Ventura
Abstract
We briefly examine the subject of computational creativity through the
lenses of three different systems for producing creative artifacts in three different
domains: music, visual art and cookery. From these we attempt to abstract something
of a “general-purpose” computationally creative agent and examine how this agent
might behave in the context of an archetypical “algorithm” for creativity. Finally, we
consider this agent's behavior from the point of view of the theory of (Turing) com-
putability and suggest that computational creativity as a field provides an interesting
opportunity for looking at computational complexity in new ways.
4.1 Inception
The question of computational creativity can be approached from several differ-
ent angles. Here we assume that creativity is possible in computational systems
and examine the idea of a general, abstract mechanism for computational creativity
that exists somehow independently from any particular domain. This is a difficult
question, and it is clear that much of creativity is not a domain independent con-
struct. However, we posit that there does exist some core abstraction or creativity
“algorithm” that can be applied to any domain (with suitable domain-specific aug-
mentation, of course). Given this hypothesis, we attempt an inductive approach to the
problem by first examining three computationally creative systems in three different
domains and then attempt to generalize from these specific examples an abstract
model of a creative system.
As a complementary view of the problem, we also discuss an abstract “algorithm”
for creativity and relate this “algorithm” to the abstract system, asking whether this
“algorithm” could, in fact, become an
algorithm
in the formal sense, and attempt to
reason about the answer to that question. In other words, we try to ascertain whether
computational creativity is actually computable.
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