Strategies for creating new informational primitives in minds and machines

Open-endedness is an important goal for designing systems that can autonomously find new and expected solutions to combinatorically-complex and ill-defined problems. Classically, issues of open-ended generation of novelty in the universe have come under the rubric of the problem of emergence. We distinguish two modes of creating novelty: combinatoric (new combinations of existing primitives, “resultants”) and creative (new primitives, “emergents”). Although combinatoric systems may differ in numbers of possible combinations, their set of possibilities is closed. Creative systems, on the other hand, have open-sets of possibilities because of the partialor ill-defined nature of the space of possible primitives. The two conceptions provide two modes for describing and understanding change and creativity: as the unfolding consequences of fixed combinatorial rules on bounded sets of pre-defined primitives or as new processes and interactions that come into play over time to define new primitives. We face several related problems. We want to know how to recognize creative novelty when it occurs (the methodological problem), we want to understand the creative process in humans and other systems (the scientific problem) such that creativity in human-machine collaborations can be facilitated and that creativity in autonomous devices can be usefully enabled (the design problem). The methodological problem can be solved by the “emergence-relative-to-a-model” approach in which an observer forms a model of the behavior of a system. Novelty and creativity are inherently in the eye of the observer, i.e. relative to some model that specifies possible alternatives. If the behavior changes, but it can still be predicted/tracked in terms of the basic categories/state set of the model, one has combinatorial creativity. If it changes, but requires new categories/observables/states for the observer to regain predictability, then one has emergent creativity (creation of new