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The impression of originality and creativity, however, is not long sustained. As
Rowe and Partridge (
1993
) report, “This [impression], however, is also short-lived
and soon gives way to dissatisfaction and eventual boredom. What is missing? If
creativity is about producing something new then Racter should certainly qualify,
but it seems that novelty is not enough.”
3
Rowe and Partridge describe many other examples in AI of the use of randomness
meant to turn the dull into something creative, without success. Lenat's AM and EU-
RISKO, while producing interesting early results, such as a set-theoretic definition
of number, soon degenerated into triviality. Similarly, Johnson-Laird (
1987
) failed
to automate jazz. W. A. Mozart attempted automated music composition also with
his “Musikalisches Würfelspiel” (musical dice game) for creating waltzes (Earn-
shaw
1991
).
4
The game produced “pretty minuets”; however, that was achieved by
Mozart's imposition of strong constraints on the possible results, leaving very little
scope for creative variation. And that is the correct objection to all of these efforts:
while introducing randomness does introduce an element of novelty, it is typically
within a very constrained scope, and so rapidly exhausted. The appetite of creativ-
ity for novelty is, however, inexhaustible—these failures illustrate the value of our
definition in action, rather than argue against it.
13.4.2 The Verstehen Objection
A general objection that might be put to our definition of creativity is that it is just
too sterile: it is a concept that, while making reference to culture and context, does
so in a very cold, formal way, requiring the identification of probability distribu-
tions representing those contexts in order to compute a probability ratio. Whatever
creativity is, surely it must have more to do with human Verstehen than that! In
response to such an objection we would say that where human Verstehen matters,
it can readily and congenially be brought into view. Our definition is neutral about
such things, meaning it is fully compatible with them and also fully compatible
with their omission. If human Verstehen were truly a precondition for creativity, it
would render the creativity of non-human animals and biological evolution impossi-
ble by definition, and perhaps also that of computers. Although we might in the end
3
Racter generates text that seems, at least superficially, to mimic schizophasia. This confused lan-
guage, or word salad is created by the mentally ill with defective linguistic faculties. A short word
salad may appear semantically novel. However, further sentences exhaust the possibilities for nov-
elty since they fall within the expected range of incoherent pattern construction.
4
The idea of generating ideas combinatorically can be traced at least to the
zairja
, a mechanical
device employed by Arabic astrologers in the late Middle Ages. This was probably the inspira-
tion for Ramon Llull's 13th century machine,
Ars Magna
, which consisted of concentric disks of
gradually reduced diameter, upon which were transcribed symbols and words. These were brought
into different combinations as the disks were rotated so that aligned symbols could be read off and
interpreted as new ideas. A few centuries later, the theologian, mathematician and music theorist,
Marin Mersenne discussed the idea of applying combinatorics to music composition in his work,
L'harmonie universelle
(1636).
