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for something to create, and of where and when a creative process has occurred. In
taking this broad stance on creativity, computational creativity necessarily concerns
itself with acts of creation wherever they occur, not just in humans. We require a
broader view of creativity as the process of creating novel things, not limited to a
suite of psychological capacities. This richer notion of creativity emerges alongside
practical innovations in our research and feeds back into informing an understanding
of creativity in humans and elsewhere.
The most prevalent example of non-human creativity is the Earth's history of
natural evolution,
1
associated with an early sense of the term “creativity”, as in
creationism
, the exclusive remit of God (Williams
1983
). Whether through Nature
or God, the biological world, including us, stands as evidence of dramatic creativity.
In a broader sense still, computers routinely, mundanely, create things. An el-
ementary type of creativity can be achieved by the rapid, random production of
varieties from a set of generative rules. In the simplest case, this can be a set of
parameter specifications that can be assigned different values to produce different
outputs. These things are creations: new entities that would not otherwise have ex-
isted. This is creativity with a crucial caveat: somebody or something
else
has to
come up with the generative rules. A pragmatic choice for very simple experiments
in computational creativity, for example, is the spirograph, in which a set of gear
ratios can be used to define a space of non-trivial visual patterns (Saunders
2001
).
Obviously, all you get from such a system is spirographs, pretty patterns with a
minuscule potential to deliver something truly surprising. Equally, one could use a
computer to begin to search the vast parameter space of all 500 by 500 pixel 24-bit
colour images, an example discussed by McCormack (
2008
). One could proffer that
there are still phenomenal 500 by 500 pixel colour images yet to be seen by a hu-
man eye, but the space to search is so vast that any naïve search has no certainty of
finding them. With generative techniques, new things
can
be created that have never
been created before, trivial though this may seem. This “generative creativity”, in
its simplest form, is a particularly weak form of creativity, but by such accounts it
still seems to be creativity.
These examples of non-human creativity are, in quite different ways, distinct
from the human cognitive activity associated with
being creative
, but they are both
important to the study of computational creativity. This chapter uses the terms gen-
erative and adaptive creativity to help unify these diverse manifestations of the act
of creating things into a common theory.
The structure of this chapter is as follows: I will explain the meaning of genera-
tive and adaptive creativity in the following section. In Sect.
14.3
, I will discuss the
relevance of generative and adaptive creativity to current research in computational
creativity. I will then consider social systems firstly as creative systems that are more
than just the sum of human creative acts, and then as both adaptively creative units
1
Discussions on this topic can be found in the chapters by Cariani (Chap. 15) and McCormack
(Chap. 2) in this topic, in earlier work in computational creativity by, for example, Bentley (
1999b
),
Perkins (
1996
) and Thornton (
2007
), and in more remote areas of study such as Bergson (
1998
)
and de Landa (
1991
).
