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Fig. 1.1
An example picture from The Painting Fool's
Dance Floor
series
enhance human creativity. In contrast, within Computational Creativity research,
we endeavour to build software which is independently creative, either to act as a
collaborator with people, or to be an autonomous artist, musician, writer, designer,
engineer or scientist. Some members of the Computational Creativity research com-
munity are interested in simulating creative processes to discover more about human
creativity, while others are more interested in the intellectual challenge of producing
autonomous creativity in software. Others simply want to generate more interesting
art, music, text, mathematics or scientific hypotheses, but have chosen to do so by
enabling the software to act as more than a tool for creative people.
Within the Computational Creativity Group at Imperial College, London,
1
we
engage in various projects where we aim to build software for creative purposes. We
work from an Artificial Intelligence perspective, whereby the solutions to problems
we encounter while trying to engineer creative behaviour help to improve existing
AI techniques, or lead to the invention of new ones. In a major project within the
group, we are building
The Painting Fool
program, which we hope will one day be
taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right. The project has been ongoing
for around seven years, driven largely by the author, but with input in recent years
by PhD students, MSc students and research associates in the group. An example
image from one of the most recent projects with The Painting Fool—as described
in Sect.
1.4.3
below—is given in Fig.
1.1
. We plan to work on The Painting Fool
in perpetuity, that is, for as long as it takes to satisfy the intellectual challenge of
building an autonomously creative system.
In one respect, we have fairly low standards: an automated painter doesn't have
to produce art at the level of a great master, an esteemed professional, an art school
1
The web pages for which are here:
ccg.doc.ic.ac.uk
.
