A Smörgåsbord of Computational Creativity Topics
Simon Colton and Alison Pease, Imperial College London
Date and time: Thursday 28th February 2013 at 16:00
Location: G28, Mech Eng
Host: Aaron Sloman
Computational Creativity has recently been (re)defined as being: "The philosophy, science and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative". In our group at Imperial (ccg.doc.ic.ac.uk), we have studied the notion of software being autonomously creative from various perspectives, which we will present in the talk with reference to recent projects we've carried out. The first perspective is practical, and we will describe the software we have developed and tested for creating poems, paintings, mathematical concepts and video games. In particular, we'll cover The Painting Fool project, where the aim is to produce software which is one day taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right. The second perspective is formal, and we will describe our efforts in bringing much needed formalism to the question of addressing progress towards autonomous creativity in software. In particular, we will give some details of the Computational Creativity Theory framework of descriptive models, the first of which covers the types of creative acts that software can undertake and the second of which covers the ways in which those creative acts could have impact.
The third perspective is philosophical, and we will describe our efforts to take a holistic view of the difficulties encountered in handing over creative responsibility to software, bringing in concepts such as the creativity tripod, issues with Turing-style tests in Computational Creativity, and the latent-heat issue: where giving software more creative responsibility can lead to a decrease in the value of its outputs. The final perspective is social, and we will present our findings from studies of social creativity in mathematics and interviews with creative artists, identifying several areas which are relevant to computational readings of creativity. We focus on three areas: (i) explanation in mathematical collaboration and our work empirically testing philosophical theories of explanation; (ii) framing information that artists give, including qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate what sorts of things artists say, how they say them, and what they don't say; and (iii) the role of serendipity in creativity, using sociological work and examples to identify components of serendipitous discoveries, and presenting computational analogues for each component.
Simon Colton (Imperial College): Reader in Computational Creativity and EPSRC Leadership Fellow Computational Creativity Group, Department of Computing, Imperial College, London www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc http://ccg.doc.ic.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=simoncolton
Alison Pease Research Associate working in the Computational Creativity Group at Imperial College London, and the Theory group at Queen Mary, University of London. Also a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/apease/research/ http://ccg.doc.ic.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=alisonpease