IFIP - 1965

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\ REPORT OF THE PANEL ON)

THE MECHANIZATION OF CREATIVE PROCESSES

The participants on this panel (with affiliations) were:

Saul Amarel (RCA Laboratories, Princeton. New Jersey)

Johm McCarthy (Stanford University)

Ulric Neisser (Unit for Experimental Psychiatry, University of

Pennsylvania)

Allen Newell (Carnegie Institute of Technology)

Gordon Pask (System Research Lt., Richmond, Surrey, England)

Leonard Uhr (University of Wisconsin)

Edward Feigenbaum (Stanford University) , Chairman

Attendance was large, and audience participation frequent and vigor-

ous, if not always clearly to the point of the session

Neisser' s opening statement introduced controversy. Neisser sees

in creative activity a merging of highly personal goals, emotions, and

experiences with the goals and required activity that society impresses

upon an individual He asserted that a machine could be creative "only if

it had a life-history somehow comparable to ours, and a motivational structure

which allowed it to fuse and combine its independent motives with the goals

we set for it " To do this, even in principle, "a computer could be programmed

to simulate cognitive development; to have a store of sensory and emotional

and social experiences from a changing and personal point of view, and a

complex set of interacting motives that had been formed in the crucible of

these experiences," Neisser said that he believed that this level of develop-

ment of artificial intelligence would not be reached for a very long time.

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Both McCarthy's and Newell's statements were directly relevant to

Neisser' s remarks

McCarthy expressed the opinion that Neisser 's remarks beclouded the

central research issues. His arguments can be summarized as follows (summary

written by McCarthy): Creativity, at least intellectual creativity as it is

observed in humans, can be defined well enough so that a claim to have mech-

anized it can be checked The problem of making a computer program behave

creatively is straightforward bu6 very difficult The essence of the problem

is that the creative program must meet two conditions: (a) It must have a

way of representing behaviors or hypotheses sufficiently gen ral that the

behavior or hypothesis to be created are representable, and (b) it must

have a sufficiently effective way of searching the space of behaviors or

hypotheses to find the behavior or hypothesis to be created in a reasonable

time.

The main points of Newell's remarks concerned goals of intelligent

problem-solving programs. Newell introduced the distinction between problem-

solving and problem-finding Assuming that computer programs can solve problems

(satisfy goals), can they find problems (i.e., create new goals for themselves?

Newell pointed out that a criticism commonly leveled against the "creativity?

of problem-solving programs is that they (allegedly) do not create their own

goals Newell then noted that this statement is in error, that a central

feature of the problem-solving activity of such programs is that they create

an elaborate hierarchy of goals, working from the main goal He then intro-

duced and discussed two other questions: where does the main goal come from,

and what are the procesees necessary to generate such goals; and, the question

of the relative homogeneity of the goal types found in present programs versus

the heterogeneity of goal types commonly associated with creative, innovative

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activity

Feigenbaum's remarks were similar. He used as a point of departure

the paper by Newell, Shaw, and Simon, The Processes of Creative Thinking.

In this paper, the authors explore the features by which the creative act is

recognized—features such as suddenness of the solution, novelty of the exe-

cution, "non-obviousness" (i.e., depth) of the solution, influence of "set",

and use of imagery in solution generation The authors point to instances

in the behavior of present-day problem-solving programs in which such features

are in evidence. The question raised by Feigenbaum was this: do we need to

go much beyond the kinds of processes represented in programs such as the

General Problem Solver, the theorem proving programs of Newell, Shaw and

Simon, Gelernter, and others, or some of the game playing programs, in order

to explain the behavior characteristic of creative activity? The answer

given was: probably yes, but we have come a long way, even with present-day

programs, toward understanding the processes of creative thought. In connec-

tion with new directions of research, Feigenbaum brought up the problem of

"modeling"—the construction of and use for inference making of internal

representations of external objects, events, and relations. This theme was

central to the discussion of Uhr and Amarel. Uhr, in his remarks, called

such structures "semantic maps" that determine how an individual interprets

and "understands" the world.

Amarel addressed the same point. He said (quotation taken from

written summary of his remarks); "I think that creative problem solving

is closely related to the notion of directing the search for solution in the

"most appropriate" space More specifically, I would like to suggest that

the formation of an appropriate concept of problem space—where a given

problem is to be treated—(in other words, the solution of the problem of

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representation) is a creative process. This process could also be regarded

as a process of building an appropriate model. While the use of given

models in problem solving has already been considered by workers in arti-

ficial intelligence, the dynamic aspects of evolving an appropriate model

have received little attention as yet." Amarel points out that such processes

have much in common with theory formation mechanisms that he has explored;

that the central question is one of efficiency; that problem solving in the

"wrong" representation space can be tremendously inefficient as compared

with performance in the "appropriate" representation space. He concludes:

"In general, I think that by mechanizing the process of selecting appropriate

representations for problem solving situations we will be making an enormous

step towards advancing artificial intelligence "Pask also discussed models in the context of problem solving by

analogy. Finding the right analogy in p problem solving situation implies

a shift of representation that can be quite powerful—produce sudden "jumps

forward" in the problem solving process . In connection with the question of

novelty in problem solving, Pask also discussed the notion of rule breaking

as a mechanism which could cause sudden dramatic shifts in the course of

problem solving

Comments and discussion from the audience were, unfortunately, not

recorded in sufficient detail by this reporter (who was engaged in listening

to them and discussing them) to set down here. This reporter's impression

was that they tended to be more cathartic than analytic, more addressed to

the question, "Can a machine really be creative?" than to the problem of

explicating mechanisms sufficient to bring about certain specific kinds of

behavior by computer programs

Edward A. FeigenbaumStanford University

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REFERENCES

Amarel, S , Comments on the Mechanization of Creative Processes, Working

Paper, RCA Laboratories, Princeton, N J., June, 1965Newell, A , Shaw, J D., and H A Simon, The Processes of Creative Thinking,

Santa Monica, Calif.: The RAND Corporation, P-1320, September, 1958.