Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents

T-720-ATAI-2019

Lecture Notes: Creativity, Curiosity

Curiosity

What It Is

The tendency of a learner to seek out novel inputs that may not have any relevance to its currently active goals.

Why It Is Important

Curiosity may be an inherent/inevitable feature of all intelligent systems that live in an uncertain environment: Because one of their top-level goals will always be self-preservation, and because they cannot fully predict what threats to this preservation the future may hold, they are forced to collect information which may become useful at a later time.
(Of course we sometimes call people “curious” who keep sticking their nose into things which may be relevant to them but which societal norms consider outside their obvious range of access - this is a different, more anthropocentric side of curiosity which is less interesting for our purposes.

Creativity

What It Is	This word has many meanings. The simplest meaning is typically “you're creative nobody else thought of that”.
How It Is Measured	Creativity is always measured with respect to some goal: If I just “do something” you cannot tell that I am creative; it is only when I tell you what the goal was (and even better, if I show you what others did with respect to that goal) that you can say for sure whether what I did qualifies as “creative” in some sense. Jackson Pollock was not creative because he splattered paint onto canvas, his work was creative because of the context in which it was done.
Why It Is Important	It is difficult to tease apart the concepts of intelligence and creativity: It is hard to imagine a great intelligence that is not creative. Likewise, it is also difficult to imagine a creative agent that is also not intelligent.
Attempts at Definitions	1. In its simplest sense it is the ability to produce solutions to problems. - This meaning treats it as a single dimension (or many that may be collapsed into one) along which we simply put a threshold for when we will classify something as “creative”. 2. A more complex version references in some way the complexity of a problem, such that solutions that address the problem in a better way (other things being equal) or achieve a similar solution with less cost (other things being equal) are more creative than others. 3. In reference to some sort of “obviousness”, a solution to a problem may be more creative if it is “less obvious”, with respect to some population, time, society, education, etc. In this case a more creative agent is one that repeatedly uncovers solutions that are “less obvious” - even to itself. This definition is relative to the knowledge it operates on (which is a good thing, because it removes the reference to background knowledge): Out of a set of processes <m>P</m> that can produce solutions to problems from a set of knowledge <m>K</m>, the process <m>p \in P</m> that reliably and repeatedly uncovers valid solutions with a small or no intersection with the output from the others is “more creative” than the others. (The trouble with this approach is that the difference between these processes might also be construed as knowledge, in which case we cannot in principle keep the knowledge constant.)

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Table of Contents

T-720-ATAI-2019

Lecture Notes: Creativity, Curiosity

Curiosity

Creativity