Using Theory Formation Techniques for the Invention of Fictional Concepts

We introduce a novel method for the formation of fictional concepts based on the non-existence conjectures made by the HR automated theory formation system. We further introduce the notion of the typicality of an example with respect to a concept into HR, which leads to methods for ordering fictional concepts with respect to novelty, vagueness and stimulation. To test whether these measures are correlated with the way in which people similarly assess the value of fictional concepts, we ran an experiment to produce thousands of definitions of fictional animals. We then compared the software’s evaluations of the non-fictional concepts with those obtained through a survey consulting sixty people. The results show that two of the three measures have a correlation with human notions. We report on the experiment, and we compare our system with the well established method of conceptual blending, which leads to a discussion of automated ideation in future Computational Creativity projects.