2.9 Personal and historical creativity

Boden also distinguishes psychological creativity—an idea new to the reasoner—from historical creativity—an idea new to a community. The first can be tested under controlled information conditions. The second requires search, priority evidence, and expert judgment. Our experiments report these statuses separately. Rediscovering a known theorem inside a generated world may demonstrate a mechanism of personal creativity without constituting a historical discovery.

The AM program is an important precedent: beginning from elementary concepts, it used heuristics to construct mathematically interesting concepts and conjectures [ Lenat , 1976 ] . Its successes and limitations suggest that a creative system needs both a generative language and explicit criteria for interestingness. Contemporary frontier models greatly enlarge the proposal engine; they do not remove the need for persistent representations and independent admission.