Monday, May 10, 2010

Artificial Creativity

Last IS class we discussed the main charachteristics of the innovative process and tried to identify, define and modelized the main stages of it. Although the innovation process holds a substantial significance to the implemetation phase - the team work, the prototyping and adjusting the idea in regard to feedbacks - , it seems to me that the most important step in the innovation process is actually the idea initiation.

In my opinion, the ability to come up with a new idea or finding a new solution for a problem is tightly linked to the question on the roots of creativity. Most of the people tends to see creativity as a gift or as something that people either have it or not, and even as something that cant really be learned but only to be developed assuming one has the right "genes"for it. This train of thoughts led many to the assumption that creativity couldnt be modelize and therefore that it is impossible to create a creative machine - a computer- that could produce brand new ideas or products.


However, along the years this assumption proved to be more and more questionable and today abundant of examples exist that proves it to be wrong (at least to some extent). The main examples comes from the relatively new field of Artificial Creativity. Artificial Creativity (or computational creativity) is a branch of Artificial Intelligence that deals with the development and exploration of systems that exhibit creative behavior. This includes systems capable of such things as scientific invention, visual artistry, music composition and story generation.

Here are some of the famous examples for Artificial Creativity:
  • Computer-robot that paints original paintings by himself: Created by Harold Cohen, "Aaron" is a AI-based program (robot-artist) that actually creates original paintings each one completely different. Aaron paintings are so amazing that if a human created paintings like AARON, we would regard him or her as an acclaimed artist. Indeed hard copies of AARON paintings have hung in museums around the world (London's Tate Modern Galley, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Washington Capital Children's Museum, to name a few).
    here are some examples of his original paintings:



    http://www.scinetphotos.com/auction.html

    http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/cohen.html

  • Computer that compose original music - Experiments in Musical Intelligence is an original and provocative study of computational creativity in music. David Cope, meriti Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, asks whether computer programs can effectively model creativity—and whether computer programs themselves can create. Defining musical creativity, and distinguishing it from creativity in other arts, Cope presents a series of experimental models that illustrate salient features of musical creativity. In his web site you can actually listen to some pieces of music composed by a computer in here: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm



  • Chatting? - A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is a natural language processing chatterbot - a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input. It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the Loebner Prize, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times. However, the program is still unable to pass the Turing test, as even a casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations. Why dont you try chat with Alice? :



Many more chatterbots available today, including Fred the psychonalyst... Some of the famous could be find in this link: http://www.simonlaven.com/fred.htm

  • Poems:
"More than iron, more than lead, more than gold
I need electricity.
I need it more than I need lamb or pork
or lettuce or cucumber.
I need it for my dreams."
(Racter, from The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed)

Well.. not exactly Shakespeare but imperssive enough considering that it was made by a computer... Here are some more examples of poems written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet:

Page

Sashay down the page

through the lioness

nestled in my soul.

(A Haiku written by Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet after reading poems by Wendy Dennis)

Imagine Now And Sing

Imagine now and sing,

creating myths

forming jewels from the falling snow.

Soul

You broke my soul

the juice of eternity,

the spirit of my lips.


I Think I'll Crash

I think I'll crash.

Just for myself with God

peace on a curious sound

for myself in my heart?

And life is weeping

From a bleeding heart

of boughs bending

such paths of them,

of boughs bending

such paths of breeze

knows we've been there

  • Telling a joke? At Edinburgh University, AI researcher Kim Binsted has developed Jape-1, a program for telling jokes. The program builds up the jokes according to simple 'templates', such as 'What do you get if you cross an X with a Y ?', and chooses words for X, Y and the pay-off word Z according to properties of the words, such as their sound and associations. Can you spot the Jape-1 jape, and the two from The Crack-a-joke Book by human joke-merchant Kaye Webb?

A - What do you give a hurt lemon? Lemonade.
B - What kind of tree can you wear? A fir coat.
C - What runs around a forest making other animals yawn? A wild boar.



Those examples led me to the question: Is it possible to have an artificial innovators? in other words, would it be possible to have a computerised system that will be creative and innovative in a sense of being able to come up with totaly different ideas and to invent actually new processess or new tools?

*B is by Jape-1

Sources

http://www.thinkartificial.org/artificial-creativity/
http://www.thinkartificial.org/category/artificialcreativity/

http://www.thinkartificial.org/aesthetics/absolut-machines/

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