A Self-defining
Game for One Player
Harold Cohen
Center for Research in Computing and the Arts
University of California, San Diego, USA
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
The word “creativity” properly implies, not the individual
act of genius, but the individual’s continuous development,
the continuous introduction of new material, the deepening
of perceptions. The mechanisms of creativity are unclear,
in large part because so much of what happens, both in the
generation of new material and in recognizing the
“rightness” of that material, happens without conscious
participation. However, most of the knowledge which
provides the underpinnings of creative behavior is
consciously acquired, even though it may have been
internalized to the point where the individual is no longer
aware that he has it. We might conclude, consequently,
that any attempt to build a creative computer program will
necessarily be knowledge-based in three areas: what the
program needs to know about the things it seeks to
represent; what it knows about its own performance; and
how to do the things it decides to do. The author
demonstrates through his AARON program that what the
program knows and what it can do are closely
interdependent.
“central issues”, which are defined by the professions and
inform their practices. The author suggests, through an
examination of his own child’s drawing practices, that the
formation of criteria probably begins in early childhood,
with the child’s attempt to gain control over its
environment.
A computer program is not a human being and creativity in
a program will not be manifested in human terms. It is not
required, for example, that it exhibit the combination of
conscious and non-conscious processes that we find in
human beings. AARON is not (yet) a creative program;
obviously a much higher level of autonomy than it has
currently is needed, particularly in relation to acquiring the
means to consider its own past. We can imagine the
program reaching a level of autonomy in which it is capable
of re-writing its own rules, but the limit to the program’s
creativity may be constrained finally by its ability to
determine its own criteria.
Creative endeavor is unpredictable, in that no one,
including the creative individual himself, could have
guessedfrom what came before what would come next. Yet
the individual seems,after each move, to have known what
he wanted and where he was going. The new state that has
emerged in the process has a sense of inevitability that
precludes the possibility that it has arisen through random
search. It is constructed, not found.
We can thus characterise creativity as a progression towards
some strongly-felt but ill-defined end-state in incremental
constructions, each successive construction serving to
clarify the end-state one step further. Feedback is central to
creativity, both in the long sweep of the individual’s career
and in the stepwise construction of new material, and we
should therefore expect any attempt to build a creative
program to be rule-based. Rules are informed by criteria,
which are not simply standards of performance but
standards of performance with respect to specific issues.
These criteria derive from the individual’s perception of his
own desired end-state and are thus differentiated f?om
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