Creativity is a topic of recurring public interest. What distinguishes the great geniuses of art, music, and science ? Every year the MacArthur Foundation awards a few individuals with "genius grants", about $300,000 to spend with no strings attached. Some of the recipients describe themselves not so much as geniuses, but as people who work with creativity, perhaps seeing things in new ways. Describing the rationale for its "genius awards", a spokesperson for the foundation recently said that they award creativity, because creativity is at the heart for how people can improve the human condition.
Is one culture inherently more creative than another? Does our educational system enhance or suppress creativity ? Is creativity one of the hallmarks of genius, or of human intelligence ? Is creativity something that animals and machines cannot do? These questions provide an inkling of how the topic of creativity permeates the social matrix.
Boden is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of Philosophy and Psychology in the School of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Sussex, England. She has written popular and influential books introducing artificial intelligence and relating it to philosophy. In The Creative Mind, she ties creativity into the research of artificial intelligence. She asks whether the mechanisms of mind studied in AI and cognitive science shed light on the nature of creativity. The AI connection brought the thesis of this book to our attention.
Creativity has often been studied, but not so much by people in AI. In brief, Boden starts with symbolic problem solving models. Problem solving is search. Creative problem solving involves finding important solutions that other searchers miss. This extra search power comes from an ability to transform the search space. So does this account stand up to scrutiny? To answer this question, we have drawn on a set of reviewers with diverse backgrounds, people from fields where creativity is recognized and people who have studied creativity.
Ken Haase is an assistant professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT where his research interests include knowledge representation, natural language processing, and automatic media description and generation. His doctoral research was in the area of machine discovery and creativity. Elsevier Science B .V. SSDZ 0004-3702(95)00067-4