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Fig. 13.3
A selection of randomly generated biomorphs generated by the software of Kowaliw,
Dorin and McCormack, chosen to show some of the variety that is possible
producing a series of patterns—its offspring. Offspring are generated by varying
some of a parent biomorph's parameters slightly, altering the placement, length and
orientation of line segments with respect to those of that parent. A child will then
be similar, but not identical to, its immediate ancestor. If the forms of a biomorph's
offspring are reliably different to those produced by any that have preceded it, then
according to our definition of creativity, the parent is creative with respect to its
ancestors. If a particular biomorph reliably generates children that are exceedingly
unlikely to be generated by any other biomorph (a possibility we can feasibly test
in software), we can also claim that the parent is quite generally creative. This ap-
proach was adopted in the experiments described below.
Biomorphs were constrained in these tests to appear in 8-bit greyscale images
within a 200 square pixel grid. Somewhere in this space of possible images is a
representation of every possible human face, including those long dead and those
that may never be born, as well as representations of every view ever seen by every
person that ever looked upon the world . . . and that is hardy scratching the surface!
In short, this represents an astronomically large space of possible images. Of course
not all of these can be generated as biomorphs. Nevertheless, the space remains
unimaginably large, even when constrained in this way. An assortment of the images
the software can generate is illustrated in Fig.
13.3
.
The images the software generated were measured with a set of image-processing
techniques that detect traits perceptible to humans. These related to the images' con-
trast, homogeneity, entropy and other measures of texture. A substantial sample was
used to give a representation of the total space of images the software can produce
and then three techniques were repeatedly applied: random image generation; an
interactive genetic algorithm; and the creativity-lite search employing a simple ver-
sion of our definition of creativity encoded in software, to try to locate a creative
individual biomorph.
As we would hope, randomly created biomorphs did not generate a high pro-
portion of creative offspring at all—the sampling of the space was adequate. When
