I studied maths because it’s so creative. Career mathematicians spend their lives creating new theorems and exploring new concepts, often just for fun.
Then I discovered the creativity of computing. After my BSc I worked for a commercial software company, and decided to do my masters dissertation on using artificial intelligence (AI) to make mathematical discoveries. I carried this on into my PhD with software to invent new mathematical concepts. I had some nice successes, but I found mathematicians didn’t really want creative software because they preferred to do the creation themselves.
I started thinking about maths as art rather than science. A few theorems can contribute to solving the energy crisis or curing cancer. But the vast majority are created for celebration and enjoyment and aren’t going to change people’s lives any more than a painting does.
I developed The Painting Fool to explore whether a computer could be truly creative – combining the imagination to envisage something innovative with the skills to create it and the ability to appreciate how successful it’s been.
If the software is in a bad mood it won’t paint. “Intentionality” is important in AI – does the software “want” to do something? So The Painting Fool reads newspaper articles to set its mood and this is reflected in the artistic media it selects and the style of the picture it produces. It won’t use grey charcoals if it’s in a happy mood, for example. I didn’t teach it this, it’s learned for itself by comparing the kind of art it intended to produce with what it actually produced.
Another of our programs came up with the original concept for a West End musical. The What-If Machine uses “fictional ideation”, following rules to create potentially successful plot lines. Its concept was about a wounded soldier who has to understand a child in order to find true love, and the result was Beyond the Fence, a musical about Greenham Common. Much of the plot, music and lyrics were also generated by computers.
Creativity isn’t just what humans do. Computers could achieve something that would be impossible for a human artist, such as sampling the zeitgeist – scanning millions of tweets to produce an artwork that reflects what the whole of society is feeling. Computers don’t think like people, and trying to emulate human thought processes can just hold them back.
Man-machine partnerships have great potential. We’re developing an app called Gamika that lets people with no programming skills develop their own games in collaboration with the app, directly on their mobile phone. The same principle could help people who are held back by disability or lack of technical ability – “please paint me a tree here,” or “please harmonise this tune for me.”
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