Systematizing Creativity: A Computational View

Creativity is a long-cherished and widely studied aspect of human behavior that allows us to reinvent the familiar and to imagine the new. Computational Creativity (CC) is a recent but burgeoning area of creativity research that brings together academics and practitioners from diverse disciplines, genres and modalities, to explore the potential of our machines to be creative in their own right. As a scientific endeavor, CC proposes that computational modeling can yield important insights into the fundamental capabilities of both humans and machines. As an engineering endeavor, CC claims that it is possible to construct autonomous systems that produce novel and useful outputs that are deserving of the label “creative.” The CC field seeks to establish a symbiotic relationship between these scientific and engineering endeavors, wherein the artifacts that are produced also serve as empirical tests of the adequacy of scientific theories of creativity. We argue that, if sufficiently nurtured by volumes such as this, the products of CC research can have a significant impact on many aspects of modern life, with real consequences for the worlds of entertainment, culture, science, education, design, and art.