Abstract
Over recent decades there has been a growing interest in the question of whether computer programs are capable of genuinely creative activity. Although this notion can be explored as a purely philosophical debate, an alternative perspective is to consider what aspects of the behaviour of a program might be noted or measured in order to arrive at an empirically supported judgement that creativity has occurred. We sketch out, in general abstract terms, what goes on when a potentially creative program is constructed and run, and list some of the relationships (for example, between input and output) which might contribute to a decision about creativity. Specifically, we list a number of criteria which might indicate interesting properties of a program’s behaviour, from the perspective of possible creativity. We go on to review some ways in which these criteria have been applied to actual implementations, and some possible improvements to this way of assessing creativity.
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Notes
They are also very much focussed on what is sometimes called ‘knowledge-poor’ programming, where a very general method does not need much hand-crafted domain knowledge to succeed. This focus is underlined by the fact that they group together, for comparison with the method being assessed, “live human players” and “human-written computer programs”.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Geraint Wiggins, Simon Colton and Alison Pease for useful discussions of this material, and Chris Thornton for comments on a draft.
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Ritchie, G. Some Empirical Criteria for Attributing Creativity to a Computer Program. Minds & Machines 17, 67–99 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-007-9066-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-007-9066-2