12. Machine Creativity

Creativity is the ability to make new things or think of new ideas. Creativity has been mystified as an act of the divine or genius in art, literature, music and invention. But in Nature, all species must have some kind of serendipity, or so-called “blind creativity,” in order to survive (Mueller ET and Dyer MG (1985) Daydreaming in human and computers. Proceedings of the ninth international joint conference on artificial intelligence, Los Angeles, CA, August 18–24, 1985). As we discussed before, insects have a default mode where they demonstrate spontaneous alternation behaviors to avoid deadlocks, bias, and blind spots. Living cells maintain a delicate balance between inheritance and mutation in order to evolve; insects explore different foraging paths around a new home; even the insect-like floor cleaning robot Roomba takes different routes whenever it bumps into a wall in order to cover the entire floor. Creativity by nature is an instinctive survival behavior. The difference between a repetitive routine and creative thinking lies in the injection of some randomness. The randomness must be organized to be efficient. Creativity is controlled chaos. In this Chapter, we explore where do creative ideas come from? How do ideas crossover, mutate and develop over time? What are major challenges in machine creativity?