The Creativity Code summary

Being creative means bending – sometimes even breaking – the rules to come up with something new. But this skill isn’t limited to art, music and literature. Look closely, and you’ll find creativity in places you’d never expect, such as the author’s field: math. 

To understand how mathematicians are creative, we must first understand what they do. 

Mathematicians and computers have something in common – they both follow sets of logical rules to reach a desired outcome. The rules encoded into a computer are called algorithms. You can think of them as a bunch of “if-then” sentences that tell the computer how to behave. For example, your email filter may follow the rule, “if an email contains the word Viagra, then place it in the spam folder.”

But algorithms do much more than sort your emails for you.

Before the dawn of machine learning, programmers were united in the belief that “You can only get out what you put in.” Meaning, a program is only as smart as the person who coded it. So, what changed their mind? It was a computer that plays board games.

Go is an ancient Chinese board game that requires intelligence, skill and creativity. Two players take turns placing black and white stones on a 19 x 19 grid. The goal is to capture your opponent’s stones by surrounding them with your own. Because Go requires complex pattern recognition and because the number of possible games is endless, it was long believed to be impossible to teach a computer how to play it. But in 2016, in a man-versus-machine showdown followed around the globe, Demis Hassabis’s AlphaGo computer took down the reigning human Go champion Lee Sedol in a four-to-one victory. How did AlphaGo achieve the impossible?

In 1993, classical composer David Cope released Bach by Design, an album of original piano pieces typical of eighteenth-century composer Johann Sebastian Bach. But the pieces weren’t written by Bach, nor were they written by Cope. They were written by Emmy, a musical software created by Cope to simulate Bach’s composition style.

The AI did such a good job that it fooled even seasoned Bach lovers. At a concert at the University of Oregon, the audience mistook one of her compositions for the original Bach – judging a lesser-known piece by the real Bach to be a fake.

We’ve gotten to know computers that compose classical music and improvise jazz riffs. Musicians, it seems, are already making ample use of the growing capabilities of AI. But what about the rest of the art world?

Computers that create visual art are actually not that new. As early as 1965, Siemens engineer Georg Nees programmed a computer to create drawings on its own. Nees’s program started from a fixed point on the screen, drawing 23 connected lines of random lengths in random directions. The result was a fascinating series of geometrical drawings.

Consider this sentence: “The children won’t eat the grapes because they are old.” Who or what is old? Unlike you – a human with some experience with children and grapes – a computer couldn’t easily answer this question. It has no definitive way of knowing who is meant by “they” in this sentence.

Natural language is full of such ambiguities. How we interpret a word often depends on context, requiring prior knowledge of the world. Because computers lack the type of intuitive knowledge that humans gather through experience, linguistic nuance is often lost on them. For the same reason, they struggle to create a meaningful narrative structure. Computer programs may be able to write a few sentences that sound like Hemingway, but they are nowhere near understanding, let alone weaving, a story like The Old Man and the Sea.

Though there’s still room for technical improvement, there’s no doubt that AIs are already creating fascinating pieces of art, music and writing. Creations like the psychedelic images of DeepDream surprise even the programmers behind the programs, proving that, in modern computing, you can get more out than you put in.

But creativity is about more than processing input and generating output. Drawing something of creative value from the algorithmic calculations of a computer still requires a human hand.

The talents of modern AI exceed many of our previous expectations. Although they’re still struggling to recognize images and understand language, computers already create fascinating pieces of art, music and literature. However, until they learn to do so consciously and with purpose, they remain creative tools rather than being creative agents themselves.