Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
interesting question to ask is: what are the mechanisms that enable this creativity? It
appears likely that any such mechanisms are numerous and diverse. While creativ-
ity is commonly associated with the human individual, clearly societies and nature
invent, too.
The psychologist David Perkins (
1996
) talks about “creative systems”; recognis-
ing that there are different mechanisms or classes of underlying systems that are all
capable of producing creative artefacts. A creative system, in this view, is simulta-
neously capable of the production of novelty and adaptation in a given context. This
suggests natural selection is a creative system, generating things like prokaryotes,
multicellularity, eusociality and language, all through a non-teleological process of
hereditary replication and selection. Social interaction is another creative system,
having given rise to cultural customs such as shaking hands and a variety of gram-
matical forms in different human languages.
A number of authors have offered explanations of fundamental creative mecha-
nisms based on evolution or evolutionary metaphors, e.g. Martindale (
1999
), Lums-
den (
1999
), Dawkins (
1999
), Aunger (
2002
). George Basalla's
The Evolution of
Technology
detailed a theory of technological evolution, offering an explanation for
the creative diversity of human made artefacts: “
novelty
is an integral part of the
made world; and a
selection
process operates to choose novel artifacts for replica-
tion and addition to the stock of made things” (Basalla
1998
). Evolution has also
played an important role in computer-based and computer-assisted creative systems
(Bentley and Corne
2002
), being able to discover, for instance, seemingly counterin-
tuitive designs that significantly exceed any human designs in performance (Keane
and Brown
1996
, Eiben and Smith
2003
, p. 10). Such results illustrate the potential
of evolutionary systems to devise unconventional yet useful artefacts that lie outside
the capabilities of current human creative thinking.
Defining a class of phenomena in formal, systemic terms allows for a transition
to the computer. The purpose of this chapter is to look at what kinds of computa-
tional processes might qualify as “creative systems” in their own right. Here I draw
my inspiration from natural systems, in particular evolutionary ecosystems. Biolog-
ical evolution is readily accepted as a creative system, as it is capable of discovering
“appropriate novelty”. The computer science adaptation of evolution, a field known
as
Evolutionary Computing
(EC), selectively abstracts from the processes of bio-
logical evolution to solve problems in search, optimisation and learning (Eiben and
Smith
2003
). It is important to emphasise
selectively abstracts
here, as only certain
components of the natural evolutionary process are used, and these are necessar-
ily highly abstracted from their physical, chemical and biological origins, for both
practical and conceptual reasons. In the case of designing a creative system, the
challenge is somewhat different than that of standard EC: understanding how a pro-
cess that is creative in one domain (biology) can be transformed to be creative in
another (e.g. the creation of art) requires different selective abstractions.
Generating the adaptive novelty exhibited in creative systems can be concep-
tualised as a process of exploration through a space of possibilities, searching for
regions of high creative reward. Perkins (
1996
) uses the metaphor of the “Klondike
space”—
Gold is where you find it.
Perkins identified four basic problem types in
