EAGER: Creative Synthesis of Interactive Artifacts through Computational Knowledge Building

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project explores a radical new theoretical and computational model for creativity, casting it as a rational pursuit of curiosity, and in particular develops a model of expressive artifact creation as a knowledge seeking effort. A discovery agent engages in the rational pursuit of curiosity when, given an experimental situation and a set of discovery actions, the agent takes the action it predicts will result in the maximum knowledge gain. This is a key feature of our proposed model of transformational creativity: creative agents in a design domain are creative precisely because they seek to increase their design knowledge in the domain. This new discovery system approach will be built on the foundations of the Co-PI's earlier contributions in formalizing the domain of game mechanics and generating a wide variety of human-playable games through logical reasoning. In doing so, the project will bridge a gap in the creativity literature? recasting the creation of aesthetic artifacts as a knowledge building process, rather than the product of a limited grammar or the knowledge-free exploration of a generative space. We call this approach expressive discovery. The proposed game design system will be focused in the creation of the underlying models of the mechanics that drive game play with the goal of providing a new game development platform. This area of computational creativity will support game design that moves beyond the production of static outputs (e.g., musical compositions or fictional stories) toward the creation of artifacts that are inherently self-reflective and interactive. This project consists of three core activities: 1) creating the first formalization that captures a large design space for interactive artifacts in a computational creative system; 2) develop a new model for discovery systems that embodies the Co-PI's model of transformational creativity as the rational pursuit of curiosity.; and 3) preliminary evaluations of the game design model formalization and the larger creative process it supports to inform future work in the area.