Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. The products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) usually have both originality and appropriateness. Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others. The studies have covered everyday creativity, exceptional creativity and even artificial creativity. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. Unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.
Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident," "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness and humour. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, science and engineering.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques. This mysterious phenomenon, though undeniably important and constantly visible, seems to lie tantalizingly beyond the grasp of scientific investigation.
More on [ Creativity ]

Artificial Creativity in Linguistics - Using genetic algorithms to create English words.
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Artificial Intelligence and Creativity - Papers from the 1993 Symposium
Ashok Goel - Ashok Goel is an Associate Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. Research in various aspects of design includes investigation of the creative exploration involved in solving problems.
Chris Thornton - Collection of papers relevant to artificial creativity and intelligence.
Creative Systems Group of Coimbra - People working in AI and Creativity
il sogno di Eliza - A project about creative interaction between artificial and human intelligence producing a story, a real fiction book. The author uses several pieces of software to create the plot, the dialogues, to find new path or check the older one. Written in italian the result is a fiction of 160 pages.
Margaret Boden - Author of The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, Boden's interests are in the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques for understanding human creativity.
Melanie Mitchell - Currently at the Santa Fe Institute. Melanie Mitchell developed Copycat as part of her dissertation work with Douglas Hofstadter on cognitive modeling of high-level perception and analogy-making.
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Raul Valdes-Perez - Papers on scientific discovery and applications to chemistry.
Stephen L. Thaler - Creator of the neural-network based Creativity Machine. Thaler has proposed it as a model of consciousness in which a neural network manifests what he calls a stream of consciousness while a second network filters the outputs from the first network. Thaler claims that these immense neural network cascades are capable of human level invention, discovery, and artistic creativity. Holds patents in the areas of neural networks, optimization, and the construction of sentient machines.
SWALE Project Home Page: Case-Based Creativity - This site, maintained by David Leake at Indiana University, describes the SWALE project's case-based reasoning approach to generating creative explanations. A simplified version of the SWALE code is available.
William H. Calvin - Theoretical neurophysiologist and author of The Cerebral Code, and How Brains Think
Meta Description: [ William H. Calvin is the author of 14 books about brains, climate, and evolution. ]
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