Theory Blending as a Framework for Creativity in Systems for General Intelligence

Being creative is a central property of humans in solving problems, adapting to new states of affairs, applying successful strategies in previously unseen situations, or coming up with new conceptualizations. General intelligent systems should have the potential to realize such forms of creativity to a certain extent. We think that creativity and productivity issues can be best addressed by taking cognitive mechanisms into account, such as analogymaking, concept blending, computing generalizations and the like. In this chapter, we argue for the usage of such mechanisms for modeling creativity. We exemplify in detail the potential of such a mechanism like theory blending using a historical example from mathematics. Furthermore, we argue for the claim that modeling creativity by such mechanisms has a huge potential in a variety of domains.