Interesting: Computational Creativity/An Interdisciplinary Approach

Oh,
I wish I would have known about this:
Computational Creativity : An Interdisciplinary Approach
http://www.dagstuhl.de/de/programm/kalender/semhp/?semnr=09291
This is what they wrote in the seminar website:

ah, we can download the research papers in pdf!!
very cool...

12.07.09 - 17.07.09, Seminar 09291

Margaret Boden (University of Sussex - Brighton, GB)
Mark d'Inverno (University of London, GB)
Jon McCormack (Monash University - Clayton, AU)

Motivation

Artistic creativity remains a mysterious, enigmatic subject — a “grand challenge” for Computer Science. While computers have exceeded the capabilities of humans in a number of limited domains (e.g. chess playing, music classification, theorem proofs, induction), human creativity generally remains unchallenged by machines and is considered a fundamental factor in our intellectual success. There is a sense that artistic creativity is somehow “special” in a way that could not be captured in an algorithm, hence implemented on a machine. This seminar aims to show that creativity is indeed special, but that it can be an emergent property of mechanical processes.

The seminar will address problems in computational creative discovery where computer processes assist in enhancing human creativity or may autonomously exhibit creative behavior independently. The intention is to develop ways of working with computation that achieve creative possibilities unattainable from any existing software systems. These goals will be developed in the context of artistic creation (visual art and music composition), however the results may be applicable to many forms of creative discovery.
The specific seminar aims are to:

* Contribute to fundamental research on our understanding of artistic creativity in humans and machines;
* Develop new methodologies for creative design in digital media, with particular emphasis on evolutionary ecosystem dynamics, where new algorithms for creative discovery are inspired by biological processes;
* Bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, with coverage across the arts and sciences, but with a common goal of furthering our understanding of how computers may generate creative behaviour, using an interdisciplinary approach.

Creativity is a vast and complex topic, investigated by many disciplines. In broad terms it involves the generation of something novel and appropriate (i.e. unexpected, valuable). In this seminar we focus on artificially creative systems, either simulated in software or software process working in synergetic tandem with a human artist. The necessary conditions for any artificial creative system must be the ability to interact with its environment, learn, and self-organise, and this is the basis of the seminar’s approach. Darwinian evolution has been described as the only theory with the explanatory power for the design and function of living systems, accounting for the amazing diversity and astonishing complexity of life. Evolutionary synthesis is a process capable of generating unprecedented novelty, i.e. it is creative. It has been able to create things like prokaryotes, eukaryotes, higher multicellularity and language through a non-teleological process of replication and selection. We would like to investigate, on a metaphoric level, the mechanisms of biological evolution in order to develop new approaches to computational creativity.