A Computational Model of Creative Design as a Sociocultural Process Involving the Evolution of Language

The aim of this research is to investigate the mechanisms of creative design within the context of an evolving language through computational modelling. Computational Creativity is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that focuses on modelling creative behaviours. Typically, research in Computational Creativity has treated language as a medium, e.g., poetry, rather than an active component of the creative process. Previous research studying the role of language in creative design has relied on interviewing human participants, limiting opportunities for computational modelling. This thesis explores the potential for language to play an active role in computational creativity by connecting computational models of the evolution of artificial languages and creative design processes. Multi-agent simulations based on the Domain-Individual-Field-Interaction framework are employed to evolve artificial languages with features that may support creative designing including ambiguity, incongruity, exaggeration and elaboration. The simulation process consists of three steps: (1) constructing representations associating topics, meanings and utterances; (2) structured communication of utterances and meanings through the playing of “language games”; and (3) evaluation of design briefs and works. The use of individual agents with different evaluation criteria, preferences and roles enriches the scope and diversity of the simulations. The results of the experiments conducted with artificial creative language systems demonstrate the expansion of design spaces by generating compositional utterances representing novel concepts among design agents using language features and weighted context free grammars. They can be used to computationally explore the roles of language in creative design, and possibly point to computational applications. Understanding the evolution of artificial languages may provide insights into human languages, especially those features that support creativity

Role-Based Perceptions of Computer Participants in Human-Computer Co-Creativity

The purpose of this ongoing research is to better un- derstand the potential contributions that computers can play in sit- uations where people interact with computers towards creative pur- suits and goals. Past research has provided sets of definitions of dif- ferent roles that a computer plays in human-computer creative col- laboration. Thus far, we look into the advantages and limitations of having such roles. In particular, this paper contributes an analysis and categorisation of the coverage of existing role classifications for computational participants in co-creativity. This analysis is comple- mented by a comparative review of the use of roles to understand and structure creative collaboration between people only (i.e. without any computational participants involved). Our wider project investigates whether these defined sets of roles are a. adequate and b. helpful for understanding the perception of computational contributions in co-creativity, with a study planned to investigate the roles of current systems in practice. This project considers both co-creative computer systems that currently exist, and systems that could potentially exist in the future. Our goal is to reach a point where the perception of what is possible in human-computer co-creative collaboration is en- abled and boosted (but not constrained) by a definitive set of roles

Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto.

Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given

Generative Design in Minecraft (GDMC), Settlement Generation Competition

This paper introduces the settlement generation competition for Minecraft, the first part of the Generative Design in Minecraft challenge. The settlement generation competition is about creating Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents that can produce functional, aesthetically appealing and believable settlements adapted to a given Minecraft map - ideally at a level that can compete with human created designs. The aim of the competition is to advance procedural content generation for games, especially in overcoming the challenges of adaptive and holistic PCG. The paper introduces the technical details of the challenge, but mostly focuses on what challenges this competition provides and why they are scientifically relevant.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Part of the Foundations of Digital Games 2018 proceedings, as part of the workshop on Procedural Content Generatio