Creativity measured by newness value and surprise in ai tasks
Towards Defining, Measuring, and Leveraging Creativity in AI Applications
Artificial Intelligence
Summary
Creativity is hard to define, especially for computers working on different tasks like art or games. The authors use ideas from psychology about what makes something creative—being new, valuable, and surprising—and turn these into a math formula. They tested this formula by measuring creativity in chess moves and paintings by famous artists. Their results suggest this formula can capture creative patterns in very different fields.
What this means in practice
- •For game developers: Evaluate and promote creative moves in strategic games like chess using a formal creativity score.
- •For digital art platforms: Assess and highlight art pieces based on a quantifiable creativity metric capturing novelty and surprise.
Authors
Jingyi Yang, Alexander Tuzhilin
Abstract
Despite extensive research, computational creativity still lacks a conceptually grounded, practically relevant, and empirically applicable formal definition across contexts such as art, scientific research, and games. Existing approaches to creativity often focus on proposing informal conceptual definitions without providing formal computational concepts. Alternatively, they propose formal definitions without carefully examining their underlying assumptions or providing validation of these definitions by testing their performance in specific application settings. To address these problems, this paper proposes several formal postulates of creativity grounded in prior psychological work on creativity, especially as related to Boden's three core criteria of creativity: newness, value, and surprise. Furthermore, we propose a conceptual mathematical definition of creativity that aligns with these postulates. We also validate our proposed creativity formula in two applications: determining the creativity of particular chess moves, and assessing the creativity of paintings by some artists, such as Picasso, Renoir, and other painters. Experimental results demonstrate that our formula of creativity successfully captures creative patterns across both the chess and the art domains. This suggests that creativity can be effectively characterized through a unified mathematical structure based on three fundamental criteria, namely newness, value, and surprise, whose specific measurements are adapted to the particular domains.