A self-defining game for one player

The word “creativity” properly implies, not the individual act of genius, but the individual’s continuous development, the continuous introduction of new material, the deepening of perceptions. The mechanisms of creativity are unclear, in large part because so much of what happens, both in the generation of new material and in recognizing the “rightness” of that material, happens without conscious participation. However, most of the knowledge which provides the underpinnings of creative behavior is consciously acquired, even though it may have been internalized to the point where the individual is no longer aware that he has it. We might conclude, consequently, that any attempt to build a creative computer program will necessarily be knowledge-based in three areas: what the program needs to know about the things it seeks to represent; what it knows about its own performance; and how to do the things it decides to do. The author demonstrates through his AARON program that what the program knows and what it can do are closely interdependent. Creative endeavor is unpredictable, in that no one, including the creative individual himself, could have guessed from what came before what would come next. Yet the individual seems, after each move, to have known what he wanted and where he was going. The new state that has emerged in the process has a sense of inevitability that precludes the possibility that it has arisen through random search. It is constructed, not found. We can thus characterise creativity as a progression towards some strongly-felt but ill-defined end-state in incremental constructions, each successive construction serving to clarify the end-state one step further. Feedback is central to creativity, both in the long sweep of the individual’s career and in the stepwise construction of new material, and we should therefore expect any attempt to build a creative program to be rule-based. Rules are informed by criteria, which are not simply standards of performance but standards of performance with respect to specific issues. These criteria derive from the individual’s perception of his own desired end-state and are thus differentiated f?om Permission tornakedigi~l o~ha~d copies Orail Orpart orthis work "' personal oT classroom use is granted without fee ptovidcd that copies are l,Ot made or distributed for profit or commercial advanta!Ze and that copies bear Ihis notice and the full citation 011 the first PGeTo cOPY otherwise, to republish, 10 post on servers or t0 redistehutc to ‘isS. requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Creativity & Cognition 99 Loughboro%h UK cop+ghtACM 1999 I-58113-078-3/99/10...$5.00 4 “central issues”, which are defined by the professions and inform their practices. The author suggests, through an examination of his own child’s drawing practices, that the formation of criteria probably begins in early childhood, with the child’s attempt to gain control over its environment. A computer program is not a human being and creativity in a program will not be manifested in human terms. It is not required, for example, that it exhibit the combination of conscious and non-conscious processes that we find in human beings. AARON is not (yet) a creative program; obviously a much higher level of autonomy than it has currently is needed, particularly in relation to acquiring the means to consider its own past. We can imagine the program reaching a level of autonomy in which it is capable of re-writing its own rules, but the limit to the program’s creativity may be constrained finally by its ability to determine its own criteria.