Tau.Neutrino said:
Edited extract from Marcus Du Sautoy’s new book, The Creativity Code, published on March 7 (HarperCollins)
What’s the purpose of humanity if machines can learn ingenuity?
Flashes of inspiration are considered a human gift that drives innovation – but the monopoly is over. AI can be programmed to invent and refine ideas and connections. What’s next?
The value placed on creativity in modern times has led to a range of writers and thinkers trying to articulate what it is, how to stimulate it, and why it is important. It was while sitting on a committee at the Royal Society assessing what impact machine learning was likely to have on society in the coming decades that I first encountered the theories of Margaret Boden. Her ideas struck me as the most relevant when it came to addressing creativity in machines.
more…
There’s a lot in that article.
> She has identified three different types of human creativity.
> Exploratory creativity involves taking what is there and exploring its outer edges, extending the limits of what is possible while remaining bound by the rules.
eg. Mathematics.
> The second sort of creativity involves combination. Think of how an artist might take two completely different constructs and seek to combine them. There are interesting hints that this sort of creativity might also be perfect for the world of AI.
It might be, but it certainly hasn’t been done yet. I’ll let you know when it has.
> It is Margaret Boden’s third form of creativity that is the more mysterious and elusive, and that is transformational creativity. These moments are like phase changes, as when water suddenly goes from a liquid to a solid. Picasso, Schoenberg, Joyce and modernism.
I disagree with Picasso and Schoenberg there, and don’t know Joyce. Picasso got his initial inspiration from brickwork, you can see it in his early work. Schoenberg got his inspiration from listening to instruments being tuned. Isn’t this simply reactionism, a deliberate reversal of Exploratory creativity using Combination?
> At first sight transformational creativity seems hard to harness as a strategy. But again the goal is to test the status quo by dropping some of the constraints that have been put in place. Try seeing what happens if we change one of the basic rules we have accepted as part of the fabric of our subject.
Oh, so it is reactionaism. Like my reactionaism in posing the question “what if the limit as x tends to infinity of x is not the same as the limit as x tends to infinity of 2*x?”. Which is deliberate rule-breaking. I was using non-Euclidean geometry as a template “what if the sum of angles at the corners of a triangle don’t sum to 180 degrees?”.
But … does this apply to Van Gogh as well? In the article “Van Gogh wrote: Great things are not done by impulse but by a series of small things brought together.” So perhaps it does.
> If I were asked to identify a transformational moment in mathematics, the creation of the square root of minus one in the mid-16th century would be a good candidate.
Yes, transformational, but not outside the gamut of what had happened before. In the sense of ‘every operation has an inverse operation’. The inverse of addition is subtraction. The inverse of multiplication is division. The inverse of taking a number to a power is taking a number to a different power.
Perhaps the genius was not in inventing complex numbers, but in realising that they had a practical use.
> How can a computer come up with the concept of the square root of minus one when the data it is fed will tell it that there is no number whose square can be negative?
It can if you tell it to look for an inverse. Of course, nobody would.
> As Picasso once said: “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” … We have an awful habit of romanticising creative genius.
> Are these strategies that can be written into computer code?
Yes. Easy-peasy. Will they? Probably not, programmers have enough trouble already with software not doing what it is supposed to do.
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Overview. I find it interesting how this article is of the combinative creativity type. Combining art and mathematics and trying to make sense of the combination.