The Effect of Input Knowledge on Creativity.pdf

The Effect of Input Knowledge on Creativity Simon Colton, Alison Pease, Graeme Ritchie Division of Informatics University of Edinburgh 80 South Bridge Edinburgh EH1 1HN United Kingdom simonco,alisonp,graeme@dai.ed.ac.uk Abstract For any program which purports to be creative, an impor- tant question is the extent to which its design (including the Recently, many programs have been written to perform tasks which are usually regarded as requiring creativity in humans. algorithms and data it uses) is contrived to produce partic- We can derive some commonalities between these programs ular outputs. That is, has the program been ‘fine-tuned’ to in order to build further creative programs. Key to this is the generate specific results? Evidence of fine-tuning can affect derivation of certain measures which assess how creative a our perception of how creative a program has been. For in- program is. Starting from recent proposals by Ritchie, we stance, one of the reasons that Lenat’s AM program (Lenat define possible measures which describe the extent to which 1982) appears creative is that it began by working in set the- a program produces novel output. We discuss how this relates ory, but switched to number theory, with its best results aris- to the creativity of the program. ing in the latter domain. However, our willingness to ac-