The Creativity Code

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about how creativity is entering a new age where AI and machine learning enhances and sometimes surpass human creativity. It is about what creativity is at its core. And it is about how

🎨 Impressions

I liked the book, and prefer the author's books as I am very fond of his documentaries.

How I Discovered It

I think Nicolai Tangen recommended it. And the simp that I am I of course jumped on. (Okay, I like the author and did not feel like a simp. And worse people have given good book recommendations.)

Who Should Read It?

People who are interested in AI on a superficial level, and would like to know more. People who like culture and music and art should also take the time to understand and read this book.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I think I did not get that changed by the book, but it made me watch the AlphaGo documentary again. The age of AI is upon us and the ones who know will surpass those who live in ignorance.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art. Claude Debussy
The chief enemy of creativity is good sense. Pablo Picasso
Boden believes that exploration accounts for 97 percent of human creativity.
The second sort of creativity involves combination. Think of how an artist might take two completely different constructs and seek to combine them. Often the rules governing one world will suggest an interesting new framework for the other. The combination is a very powerful tool in the realm of mathematical creativity. The eventual solution of the Poincaré Conjecture, which describes the possible shapes of our universe, was arrived at by applying very different tools to understand flow over surfaces.
As Van Gogh wrote: ‘Great things are not done by impulse but by small things brought together.’
The American Go Association estimates that it would take a number with 300 digits to count the number of games of Go that are legally possible. In chess the computer scientist Claude Shannon estimated that a number with 120 digits (now called the Shannon number) would suffice. These are not small numbers in either case, but they give you a sense of the wide range of possible permutations.
Shapley was amused by the award: ‘I consider myself a mathematician and the award is for economics,’ he said at the time, clearly surprised by the committee’s decision. ‘I never, never in my life took a course in economics.’ But the mathematics he cooked up has had profound economic and social implications.
This is a powerful reminder that, as our lives are increasingly pushed around by algorithms, it’s important to understand how they work and what they’re doing, because otherwise you may be getting shafted.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. Alan Turing
It is an extraordinary fact that 90 per cent of the world’s data has been created in the last five years.
Humankind now produces in two days the same amount of data it took us from the dawn of civilisation until 2003 to generate.
‘For some reason, lots of people have screen-savers of deserts and it picks it up, thinking it is skin colour.’ The contours of the dunes also seem to correspond to shapes the algorithms pick up as curvaceous naked body parts.
On 17 December 2009 four users brought a legal case against Netflix, claiming that the company had violated the video privacy protection act by releasing the data. One of the users said she was a closet lesbian mother and that the data about her movie preferences could have revealed this fact. That you might be able to infer sexual orientation or political leanings from your movie preferences has led to this being called the Brokeback Mountain factor.
How did that machine learn to play the Atari game of Breakout without being told the rules of the game? All it had was knowledge of the pixels on the screen and a score and a paddle that could be moved left or right. The algorithm was programmed to calculate the effect on the score of moving left or right given the current state of the screen. The impact of a move could be several seconds down the line, so you have to calculate the delayed impact. This is quite tricky because it isn’t always clear what causes a certain effect. This is one of the shortcomings of machine learning: it sometimes picks up correlation and believes it to be causation. Animals suffer from the same problem.
Stones crafted to create a cutting tool began to appear 2. million years ago, but this moment of innovation does not seem to have sparked a great creative surge. The human drive to create art seems to emerge 100, years ago.
As Andy Warhol declared: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’
Interesting questions of copyright ownership have been raised when animals have been given tools to create. David Slater, who left a camera in the Tangkoko nature reserve in Indonesia to see if he could get the resident macaques to take photographs, was overjoyed when he developed the film to discover that the macaques had taken the most extraordinary selfies. When the pictures found their way on to the internet, he decided to sue the users for breach of copyright. It took a while for his case to wend its way to trial, but in August 2014 the US courts surprised him by denying him ownership of the pictures on the grounds that an item created by a non-human cannot be copyrighted. Things got more bizarre the following year, when the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, filed a counter-suit against Slater for breaching the macaque’s copyright. This case was thrown out of court.
Creativity is about conscious or subconscious choices, not random behaviour. Yet the constraints he had introduced, combined with randomness, had led to the creation of something that has enough tension to hold the eye.
Modern physics asserts that the only truly random thing happens at a quantum level. It is on the level of subatomic particles that there is some element of choice in the future evolution of the universe.
Pollock’s approach may appear mechanical, but he threw himself into every one of his paintings. ‘It doesn’t matter how the paint is put on,’ he wrote in describing his method, ‘as long as something is said. Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.’
It seems that when you smooth out the asymmetries, you end up with something quite attractive.
The AI painting totally failed to elicit what Jones calls the Rembrandt Shudder, that feeling one gets in front of every true Rembrandt masterpiece.
‘The Cubists are not waiting for the war to end to recommence hostilities against good sense.’
This is captured in something called the Wundt curve. If we are too habituated to the artwork around us, it leads to indifference and boredom. This is why artists never really stabilise in their work: what arouses the artist (and eventually the viewer) is something distinct. The challenge is that the push to arousal or dissonance must not be so great that we hit the downslope of the Wundt
the not too new, Elgammal steeped himself in the ideas of the psychologist and philosopher D. E. Berlyne, who argued that the psychophysical concept of ‘arousal’ was especially relevant to the study of aesthetic phenomena. Berlyne believed the most significant arousal-raising properties of aesthetics were novelty, unexpectedness, complexity, ambiguity, and the ability to puzzle or confound. The trick was to be new and surprising without drifting so far from expectation that arousal turned to aversion because the result was just too strange. This
This is captured in something called the Wundt curve. If we are too habituated to the artwork around us, it leads to indifference and boredom. This is why artists never really stabilise in their work: what arouses the artist (and eventually the viewer) is something distinct. The challenge is that the push to arousal or dissonance must not be so great that we hit the downslope of the Wundt curve. There is a maximum hedonic value that the artist is after.
Sudden illumination is a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. Henri Poincaré
Mathematics is the science of spotting and explaining patterns.
It’s this ability to spot a pattern that gives humans an edge in negotiating the natural world, because it allows us to plan into the future. Humans have become very adept at spotting these patterns, because those who missed the pattern didn’t survive.
When people I meet declare (as alas so often happens): ‘I don’t have a brain for maths’, I counter that in fact we all have evolved to have mathematical brains because our brains are good at spotting patterns
David Hilbert lectured on geometry he stressed this point: ‘One must be able to say at all times – instead of points, lines and planes – tables, chairs and beer mugs.’ His point was that provided the things had the relationship expressed by the axioms, then the deductions would make as much sense for chairs and beer mugs as for geometric lines and planes.
Our writing tools participate in the writing of our thoughts. Friedrich Nietzsche
Take the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, a theorem close to my own research. This is a sort of periodic table of the symmetrical atoms from which all symmetrical objects can be built. It is called the ‘Monster Theorem’ because the proof is 10, pages long and spans 100 journal articles and involved hundreds of mathematicians. The list of atoms includes twenty-six strange exceptional shapes called sporadic simple groups. There’s always been a sneaking suspicion that a twenty-seventh might be out there that the proof may have missed. Could a computer help us check such a complex proof?
As Hume first pointed out, much of science relies on a process called induction: inferring a general law or principle from the observation of particular instances. Why is this a sound way of generating scientific truths? Principally because of induction! We can point to many cases where this inductive principle seems to lead to good scientific theories. This leads us to conclude (or induce) that induction is a good approach to doing science.
‘Every fool can ask questions about prime numbers that the wisest man cannot answer
Kurt Gödel, the Austrian logician, has proven that mathematics has true statements for which there are no proofs.
We are very good at figuring out things that computers can’t do. If we were to imagine a future in which all the theorems we currently know about could be proven on a computer, we would just figure out other things that a computer can’t solve, and that would become ‘mathematics’.
As the famous Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös quipped: ‘A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.’
After all, as Bach’s student Lorenz Mizler von Kolof once said: ‘Music is just the process of sounding mathematics.’
A similar hack occurred when the official title for the Russian Federation was translated into Ukrainian as Mordor (the land occupied by The Lord of the Rings’ evil Sauron).
As Franz Kafka said: ‘All language is but a poor translation.’
This was certainly a motivation for George Orwell: ‘When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.’