Gencad: a Hybrid Analogical/evolutionary Model of Creative Design

Computational models of creative design typically adopt a specific mechanism and apply that mechanism to a design space to demonstrate its potential for generating creative designs. For example, some computational models use analogy as a reasoning mechanism for developing novel designs from previous designs and others use evolutionary algorithms as a way of searching the design space to get to parts of the space that may not be visited using other search techniques. In this paper we present a computational model of creative design that combines analogy and evolution in an integrated framework, drawing on the strengths of each for generating creative designs. We describe the process model, present and discuss a sample application domain, and give some experimental results. In the end, we evaluate the combined computational model in terms of the reasoning process followed by the model and the designs that the model generates.