A closer look at creativity as search

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Creativity Support System for cake design

In this paper, a new formulation of Creativity is presented in the context of Creativity Support Systems. This formulation is based on the central ideas of the theory of Boden. It redefines some concepts such as appropriateness and relevance in order to allow the implementation of a support system for creative people. The approach is based on the conceptual space proposed by Boden and formalized by other authors. The presented formulation is applied to a real case in which a new chocolate cake with fruit is design. Data collected from a Spanish chocolate chef has been used to validate the proposed system. Experimental results show that the formulation presented is not only useful for understanding how the creative mechanisms of design works, but also facilitates its implementation in real cases to support creativity processes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Transformational creativity tool to support musical composition

In this paper we use the idea of conceptual space introduced by Boden and redefine some properties such appropriateness and relevance that facilitate the computational implementation of the transformational creativity mechanism. While appropriateness can only be evaluated by an expert, relevance can be objectively measured for any spectator. Computational creativity is based on the relationship between appropriateness and relevance of a concept, and therefore a computational system can be used to support this task. The paper analyses this relationship in the field of music in order to obtain a computer tool to support the musical composition task.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A transformational creativity tool to support chocolate designers

A new formulation of the central ideas of Boden's well-established theory on combinational, exploratory and transformational creativity is presented. This new formulation, based on the idea of conceptual space, redefines some terms and includes several types of concept properties (appropriateness and relevance), whose relationship facilitates the computational implementation of the transformational creativity mechanism. The presented formulation is applied to a real case of chocolate designing in which a novel and flavorful combination of chocolate and fruit is generated. The experimentation was conducted jointly with a Spanish chocolate chef. Experimental results prove the relationship between appropriateness and relevance in different frameworks and show that the formulation presented is not only useful for understanding how the creative mechanisms of design works but also facilitates its implementation in real cases to support creativity processes.Postprint (author's final draft

Can a Computationally Creative System Create Itself? Creative Artefacts and Creative Processes

This paper begins by briefly looking at two of the dominant perspectives on computational creativity; focusing on the creative artefacts and the creative processes respectively. We briefly describe two projects; one focused on (artistic) creative artefacts the other on a (scientific) creative process, to highlight some similarities and differences in approach. We then look at a 2- dimensional model of Learning Objectives that uses independent axes of knowledge and (cognitive) processes. This educational framework is then used to cast artefact and process perspectives into a common framework, opening up new possibilities for discussing and comparing creativity between them. Finally, arising from our model of creative processes, we propose a new and broad 4-level hierarchy of computational creativity, which asserts that the highest level of computational creativity involves processes whose creativity is comparable to that of the originating process itself

Can a Computationally Creative System Create Itself? Creative Artefacts and Creative Processes

This paper begins by briefly looking at two of the dominant perspectives on computational creativity; focusing on the creative artefacts and the creative processes respectively. We briefly describe two projects; one focused on (artistic) creative artefacts the other on a (scientific) creative process, to highlight some similarities and differences in approach. We then look at a 2- dimensional model of Learning Objectives that uses independent axes of knowledge and (cognitive) processes. This educational framework is then used to cast artefact and process perspectives into a common framework, opening up new possibilities for discussing and comparing creativity between them. Finally, arising from our model of creative processes, we propose a new and broad 4-level hierarchy of computational creativity, which asserts that the highest level of computational creativity involves processes whose creativity is comparable to that of the originating process itself

Action Selection in the Creative Systems Framework

The Creative Systems Framework (CSF) formalises creativity as search through a space of concepts. As a formal account of Margaret Boden’s descriptive hierarchy of creativity, it is at the basis of multiple studies dealing with diverse aspects of Computational Creativity (CC) systems. However, the CSF at present neither formalises action nor action selection during search, limiting its use in analysing creative processes. We extend the CSF by explicitly modelling these missing components in the search space traversal function. We furthermore introduce a distinction between a concept and its material realisation as an artefact, and elaborate the action selection process to provide stopping criteria for creative search. Our extension, the Creative Action Selection Framework (CASF), is informed by previous studies in CC and draws on concepts from Markov Decision Processes (MDP). It allows us to describe a creative system as an agent selecting actions based on the value, validity and novelty of concepts and artefacts. The CASF brings the descriptive power of the CSF to a wider range of systems with more analytical depth.Peer reviewe

Hierarchical reinforcement learning as creative problem solving

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Hierarchical reinforcement learning as creative problem solving journaltitle: Robotics and Autonomous Systems articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2016.08.021 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A constructive theory of automated ideation

In this thesis we explore the field of automated artefact generation in computational creativity with the aim of proposing methods of generation of ideas with cultural value. We focus on two kinds of ideas: fictional concepts and socially embedded concepts. For fictional concepts, we introduce a novel method based on the non-existence-conjectures made by the HR automated theory formation system. We further introduce the notion of typicality of an example with respect to a concept into HR. This leads to methods for ordering fictional concepts with respect to three measurements: novelty, vagueness and stimulation. We ran an experiment to produce thousands of definitions of fictional animals and then compared the software's evaluations of the non-fictional concepts with those obtained through a survey consulting sixty people. The results showed that two of the three measurements have a correlation with human notions.For socially embedded concepts, we apply a typicality-based classification method, the Rational Model of Classification (RMC), to a set of data obtained from Twitter. The aim being the creation of a set of concepts that naturally associate to an initial topic. We applied the RMC to four sets of tweets, each corresponding to one of four initial topics. The result was a set of clusters per topic, each cluster having a definition consisting of a set of words that appeared recurrently in the tweets. A survey was used to ask people to guess the topic given a set of definitions and to rate the artistic relevance of these definitions. The results showed both high association percentage and high relevance scores. A second survey was used to compare the rankings on the social impact of each of the definitions. The results obtained show a weak positive correlation between the two rankings. Our experiments show that it is possible to automatically generate ideas with the purpose of using them for artefact generation. This is an important step for the automation of computational creativity because most of the available artefact generation systems do not explicitly undertake idea generation. Moreover, our experiments introduce new ways of using the notion of typicality and show how these uses can be integrated in both the generation and evaluation of ideas.Open Acces

A contribution to the incorporation of sociability and creativity skills to computers and robots

This dissertation contains the research and work completed by the PhD candidate on the incorporation of sociability and creativity skills to computers and robots. Both skills can be directly related with empathy, which is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. In this form, this research can be contextualized in the framework of recent developments towards the achievement of empathy machines. The first challenge at hands refers to designing pioneering techniques based on the use of social robots to improve user experience interacting with them. In particular, research focus is on eliminating or minimizing pain and anxiety as well as loneliness and stress of long-term hospitalized child patients. This challenge is approached by developing a cloud-based robotics architecture to effectively develop complex tasks related to hospitalized children assistance. More specifically, a multiagent learning system is introduced based on a combination of machine learning and cloud computing using low-cost robots (Innvo labs's Pleo rb). Moreover, a wireless communication system is also developed for the Pleo robot in order to help the health professional who conducts therapy with the child, monitoring, understanding, and controlling Pleo behavior at any moment. As a second challenge, a new formulation of the concept of creativity is proposed in order to empower computers with. Based on previous well established theories from Boden and Wiggins, this thesis redefines the formal mechanism of exploratory and transformational creativity in a way which facilitates the computational implementation of these mechanisms in Creativity Support Systems. The proposed formalization is applied and validated on two real cases: the first, about chocolate designing, in which a novel and flavorful combination of chocolate and fruit is generated. The second case is about the composition of a single voice tune of reel using ABC notation.Postprint (published version