ifc-0086

6.1 A map by creative object

Table 6.1 gives a first orientation. The rows overlap: AI Feynman, for example, is simultaneously a search algorithm, a symbolic regression system, and a scientific-discovery benchmark. The classification marks its primary output and certificate rather than forcing each system into one exclusive school.

Tradition	Creative object	Generative mechanism	Typical certificate
Information and surprise	an unexpected description or repertoire	probabilistic or order-theoretic comparison	information gain, improbability, or surprise
Heuristic discovery	a concept, conjecture, law, or search path	heuristics over a represented problem space	usefulness, rediscovery, proof, or prediction
Computational creativity	an artifact and sometimes the producing process	generation, transformation, appraisal, and interaction	novelty, value, intentionality, and observer judgment
Neuroscience of creativity	a creative cognitive process realized in a brain	interacting neural systems supporting generation and evaluation	behavioral tasks, neuroimaging, stimulation, and convergent evidence
Symbolic regression	an equation explaining numerical data	numerical fitting plus symbolic decomposition and search	exact or predictive recovery with controlled complexity
Automated science	a hypothesis–experiment–revision cycle	active experimentation and machine interpretation	reproducible intervention and held-out prediction
Synthetic creativity	a typed construction or admitted extension relative to a maintained theory	typed composition, local probing, finite theory surgery, and transport	proof, countermodel, simulation, or independent evidence

Table 6.1 Traditions organized by their principal creative object. The final column is decisive: different objects require different admission certificates.

The final row does not subsume the others. Information-theoretic scores can guide search; computational-creativity criteria can assess process and presentation; symbolic regression can propose laws; and automated laboratories can test them. Synthetic creativity asks what additional structure is needed when the intended output is a reusable theory rather than a single artifact or formula.