own research takes tools from number theory to understand primes and applies them to classify possible symmetries. The symmetries of geometric objects at first sight don’t look anything like numbers. But applying the language that has helped us to navigate the mysteries of the primes and replacing primes by symmetrical objects has revealed surprising new insights into the theory of symmetry.
The arts have also benefited greatly from this form of cross-fertilisation. Philip Glass took ideas he learned from working with Ravi Shankar and used them to create the additive process that is at the heart of his minimalist music. Zaha Hadid combined her knowledge of architecture with her love of the pure forms of the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich to create a unique style of curvaceous buildings. In cooking, too, creative master chefs have fused cuisines from opposite ends of the globe.
There are interesting hints that this sort of creativity might also be perfect for the world of AI. Take an algorithm that plays the blues and combine it with the music of Boulez and you will end up with a strange hybrid composition that might just create a new sound world. Of course, it could also be a dismal cacophony. The coder needs to find two genres that can be fused algorithmically in an interesting way.
It is Boden’s third form of creativity that is the more mysterious and elusive, and that is transformational creativity. This describes those rare moments that are complete game changers. Every art form has these gear shifts. Think of Picasso and Cubism, Schoenberg and atonality, Joyce and modernism. They are like phase changes, when water suddenly goes from a liquid to a gas. This was the image Goethe hit on when he sought to describe wrestling for two years with how to write The Sorrows of Young Werther, only for a chance event to act as a sudden catalyst: ‘At that instant, the plan of Werther was found; the whole shot together from all directions, and became a solid mass, as the water in a vase, which is just at the freezing point, is changed by the slightest concussion into ice.’
Quite often these transformational moments hinge on changing the rules of the game, or dropping an assumption that previous generations had been working under. The square of a number is always positive. All molecules come in long lines not chains. Music must be written inside a harmonic scale structure. Faces have eyes on either side of the nose. At first glance it would seem hard to program such a decisive break, and yet there is a meta-rule for this type of creativity. You start by dropping constraints and see what emerges. The art, the creative act, is to choose what to drop or what fresh constraint to introduce such that you end up with a new thing of value.
If I were asked to identify a transformational moment in mathematics, the creation of the square root of minus one in the mid-sixteenth century would be a good candidate. This was a number that many mathematicians believed did not exist. It was referred to as an imaginary number (a derogatory term Descartes came up with to indicate that of course there was no such thing). And yet its creation did not contradict previous mathematics. It turned out it had been our mistake to exclude it. How can a computer come up with the concept of the square root of minus one when the data it is fed will tell it that there is no number whose square can be negative? A truly creative act sometimes requires us to step outside the system and create a new reality. Can a complex algorithm do that?
The emergence of the Romantic movement in music is in many ways a catalogue of rule breaking. Instead of moving between close key signatures as Classical composers had done, new upstarts like Schubert chose to shift key in ways that deliberately broke expectations. Schumann left chords unresolved that Haydn or Mozart would have felt the need to complete. Chopin in turn composed dense moments of chromatic runs and challenged rhythmic expectations with his unusual accented passages and bending of tempos. The move from one musical movement to another: from Medieval to Baroque to Classical to Romantic to Impressionist to Expressionist and beyond is a story of breaking the rules. Each movement is dependent on the one before to appreciate its creativity. It almost goes without saying that historical context plays an important role in allowing us to define something as new. Creativity is not an absolute but a relative activity. We are creative within our culture and frame of reference.
Can a computer initiate this kind of phase change and move us into a new musical or mathematical state? That seems a challenge. Algorithms learn how to act based on the data they interact with. Won’t this mean that they will always be condemned to producing more of the same?
As Picasso once said: ‘The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.’ That sounds on the face of it very much against the spirit of the machine. And yet you can program a system to behave irrationally. You can create a meta-rule that will instruct it to change course. As we shall see, this is in fact something machine learning is quite good at.
Can creativity be taught?
Many artists like to fuel their own creation myth, appealing to external forces as responsible for their creativity. In Ancient Greece poets were said to be possessed by the muses, who breathed inspiration into the minds of men, sometimes sending them insane in the process. For Plato ‘a poet is holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself and reason is no longer in him … for no art does he utter but by power divine’. Ramanujan, the great Indian mathematician, likewise attributed his great insights to ideas he received in his dreams from his family goddess Namagiri. Is creativity a form of madness or a gift of the divine?
One of my mathematical heroes, Carl Friedrich Gauss, was one of the worst at covering his creative tracks. Gauss is credited with creating modern number theory with the publication in 1798 of one of the great mathematical works of all time: Disquisitiones arithmeticae. When people tried to read the book to uncover where he got his ideas, they were mystified. The work has been described as a book of seven seals. Gauss seems to pull ideas like rabbits out of a hat, without ever really giving us an inkling of how he achieved this magic. Later, when challenged, he retorted that an architect does not leave up the scaffolding after the house is complete. Gauss, like Ramanujan, attributed one revelation to ‘the Grace of God’, saying he was ‘unable to name the nature of the thread which connected what I previously knew with that which made my success possible’.
Yet the fact that an artist may be unable to articulate where their ideas came from does not mean that they followed no rules. Art is a conscious expression of the myriad of logical gates that make up our unconscious thought processes. There was of course a thread of logic that connected Gauss’s thoughts: it was just hard for him to articulate what he was up to – or perhaps he wanted to preserve the mystery, to fuel his image as a creative genius. Coleridge’s claim that the drug-induced vision of Kubla Khan came to him in its entirety belies all the preparatory material that shows the poet working on the ideas before that fateful day when he was interrupted by the person from Porlock. Of course, this makes for a good story. Even my own account of creation will focus on the flash of inspiration rather than the years of preparatory work I put in.
We have an awful habit of romanticising creative genius. The solitary artist working in isolation is frankly a myth. In most instances what looks like a step change is actually a continuous growth. Brian Eno talks about the idea of ‘scenius’, not genius, to acknowledge the community out of which creative intelligence often emerges. The American writer Joyce Carol Oates agrees: ‘Creative work, like scientific work, should be greeted as a communal effort – an attempt by an individual to give voice to many voices, an attempt to synthesize and explore and analyze.’
What does it take to stimulate creativity? Might it be possible to program it into a machine? Are there rules we can follow to become creative? Can creativity, in other words, be a learned skill? Some would say that to teach or program is to show people how to imitate what has gone before, and that imitation and rule following are both incompatible with creativity. And yet we have examples of creative individuals all around us who have studied and learned and improved their skills. If we study what they do, could we imitate them and ultimately become creative ourselves?
These
