What if Machines Could be Creative?

Computational creativity is the field of research that is concerned with making computers creative. In this paper, we focus on a particular subfield of this domain, combinatorial creativity. This subfield is concerned with combining components of existing concepts into new concepts. For example, we can combine the concept of a watch with the capabilities of a smartphone – and obtain a smartwatch. Or we could combine a bus service with the characteristics of a taxi and obtain a bus service on-demand. Combinatorial creativity serves different purposes: it can be used to develop new business ideas, to find plots for books or movies, to understand human creativity, to disrupt conventional assumptions, and to find design alternatives. In the long run, the dream is that computational creativity could help humans come up with new inventions. With this demo, we take a first step in this direction. We propose a system for computer-assisted brainstorming, i.e., for generating hypotheses to aid human creativity. More precisely, given an input concept (such as “car”), our system proposes variations on it (such as “What if a car did not have wheels?”, or “What if a car could park automatically?”). This paper explores different ways of generating such proposals.