Creativity is one of the most important abilities of humans. Our creative skills and ability to express it distinguishes us in obvious ways from the rest of the animal kingdom. Through creativity the human race has invented complex technology enabling it to acquire almost all abilities evident in other animals, as well as to go beyond them (e.g. interstellar travel, infrared vision). Considering the importance of creativity to our existence, surprisingly few studies have been directly aimed at understanding the general underlying structure of creativity mechanisms. By exploring the roots of creative mechanisms I hope to be able to understand by which means it is best to construct a general creativity system which can be applied in various different intelligence systems.
To get around the inherent limitations of human subject experiments I am building a simulation environment for exploring alternative theories of creativity and setting up an environment where higher-level psychological variables and cognitive functions, such as perception and planning, are under direct control of the experimenter.
The primary hypotheses of interest here are that the evolution of creativity mechanisms are directly related to the complexity/diversity of the environment, and that the underlying mechanisms of creative behavior are essentially the same in all creatures, despite the obvious human advantages mentioned above. Depending on (a) the number of individual components in the environment and their interactions, (b) the creatures' ability to perceive their environment, and (c) the creatures' set of operators which can by applied to modify their behavioral pattern (in particular, to make plans), an increase in environmental diversity will result in a larger set of distinct behavioral patterns (plans) and, if the world is random, there will be no persistent structure evident in the composition of plans. 1 A secondary hypothesis to be addressed states that creativity is bound by rules inherent in the environment.
The hypotheses are grounded in the conjecture that creativity is evolution’s answer to perceptually apparent unpredictability. This is different from some hypothetical or “actual” unpredictability – the discussion here revolves around unpredictability from the standpoint of the creature. A simplified version of the conjecture can be stated as follows: Creatures inhabiting a simple, closed and static world would tend to evolve to become completely robotic due to predictability of the environment; if an environment is very simple the cognitive system of the creatures require little or no effort to evolve mechanisms for survival. In a complex world, where events in the environment are not evident entirely by observation of the current situation, evolution must provide organisms with a mechanism to predict in uncertain situations. With the increase of interacting components in the environment, more complex cognitive efforts are thus required to produce and assess reactions to the current situation.
The paper is organized as follows: The related research and the theoretical foundation of the background hypotheses is discussed, followed by a short introduction to the terminology used in this paper. Then we present an example simulation environment for testing these hypotheses. At last we propose mechanisms for quantifying plan diversity and environmental complexity that will serve as the basis for quantitative measures of creativity.
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A Framework for Exploring the Evolutionary Roots of Creativity
