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we are concerned with exactly these issues because we wish to automate the pro-
duction of creative works by software. Before we can do this we must have a clear,
formal conception of creativity—something that seems to be currently lacking. Con-
ventional interpretations of “creativity” incorporate informally defined concepts of
the “appropriateness” and the “value” of artefacts. The programmers and artists re-
sponsible for generative software can be understood to either hard-code a personal
aesthetic value into their software, or they may allow it to emerge from the interac-
tions of software components (such as virtual organisms) that they have designed.
In this latter case, the virtual organisms establish their own, non-human notions of
value, but the system as a whole still has value hard-coded into it by the artist. In this
light, writing software is no different from any other artistic practice. However, if
we want software to generate creative outcomes of its own accord, and in so doing
realise a kind of creativity beyond what is hard-coded by the artist, we must pro-
vide it with an explicit, formal conception of creativity with which to gauge its own
success.
Below we discuss an approach that allows the explicit measurement of the cre-
ativity of artefacts by defining it independently of notions of value or appropriate-
ness and in such a way that its presence may be detected algorithmically. We discuss
how the technique has been applied to automatically guide software towards creative
outcomes, and we summarise the results of a survey conducted to ascertain its rela-
tionship to human natural-language use of the term creativity . We necessarily begin
by examining the concept of creativity itself.
13.2 What Is Creativity?
Creativity was originally a term applied solely to the gods. Over the centuries the
term became more broadly applied, eventually reaching beyond gods and demi-gods
to include human artists, scientists, engineers, those in marketing and even business
executives (see Tatarkiewicz 1980 , Albert and Runco 1999 for historical accounts
of the term's application). Creativity has also been attributed to the form-producing
interactions of matter (Smuts 1927 , Chap. 3), in particular its behaviour under the
guidance of the evolutionary process or through interactions that give rise to emer-
gence (Phillips 1935 )—interactions of small components that give rise to a whole
that is somehow more then the sum of its parts. The creativity of natural and artificial
evolution has also been discussed by Bentley ( 2002 ), a topic that forms an impor-
tant aspect of this chapter. Bentley explores loosely and briefly whether a number of
definitions of creativity allow the evolutionary process to qualify. We take a reverse,
and more general approach, first describing a workable, coherent definition of cre-
ativity, and then looking to see the extent to which natural and artificial processes,
including evolution, meet its requirements.
The historically dominant approach to understanding creativity links it explicitly
to intelligence and the concept of authorship. This has thrown up some philosophical
puzzles over recent years. For instance,
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