First of all, I can highly recommend Nachmanovitch’s Free Play. It’s at the very least thought-provoking and entertaining—whether it helps you be more creative is harder to tell. I got a bit of milage creativitywise out of Comedy Writing Secrets, which I hear is well-regarded among professional humor writers. I wasn’t very diligent about the exercises, or I might have gotten more out of it.
Regarding LW-like thought and creativity, I’m reading through Minsky’s Society of Mind and the Puzzle Principle section talks about machines and creativity:
Many people reason that machines do only what they’re programmed to do — and hence can never be creative or original. The trouble is that this argument presumes what it purports to show: that you can’t program a machine to be creative! In fact, it is surprisingly easy to program a computer so that it will proceed to do more different things than any programmer could imagine in advance.
And he goes into a bit more detail.
My thoughts on this, cribbed more or less directly from my notes:
I think there’s an equivocation in common uses of the word “creativity.” There’s one sense, generally used by technical people, that means something like the ability to make intuitive leaps when solving a problem. Then there’s the other sense, which is probably closer to what most people mean, the attributive sense. That is, someone might be a creative person, meaning they make those intuitive leaps, yes, but they also have certain stereotypical personality traits; they’re quirky, they dress in non-conformitive ways, they’re artsy, emotional. And so on.
So Minsky’s answer doesn’t really adequately address what most people mean when they say you can’t program a machine to be creative.
But of course you can, and we’re getting better and better at this.
First of all, I can highly recommend Nachmanovitch’s Free Play. It’s at the very least thought-provoking and entertaining—whether it helps you be more creative is harder to tell. I got a bit of milage creativitywise out of Comedy Writing Secrets, which I hear is well-regarded among professional humor writers. I wasn’t very diligent about the exercises, or I might have gotten more out of it.
Regarding LW-like thought and creativity, I’m reading through Minsky’s Society of Mind and the Puzzle Principle section talks about machines and creativity:
And he goes into a bit more detail.
My thoughts on this, cribbed more or less directly from my notes:
I think there’s an equivocation in common uses of the word “creativity.” There’s one sense, generally used by technical people, that means something like the ability to make intuitive leaps when solving a problem. Then there’s the other sense, which is probably closer to what most people mean, the attributive sense. That is, someone might be a creative person, meaning they make those intuitive leaps, yes, but they also have certain stereotypical personality traits; they’re quirky, they dress in non-conformitive ways, they’re artsy, emotional. And so on.
So Minsky’s answer doesn’t really adequately address what most people mean when they say you can’t program a machine to be creative.
But of course you can, and we’re getting better and better at this.