A new science of creativity?

At a party in New York, I had the opportunity to talk to Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players in history and the world chess champion who lost in 1996 against IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue.

I asked Kasparov how it was possible for humans to compete so efficiently in chess with far less need for mental computational prowess than AI.

The chessmaster explained that chess was less of a sport and more of an art. That humans differentiated in their playing styles, but shared a mysterious ability to intuitively recognize patterns that allowed them to identify which moves “smelled” correctly without knowing exactly how.

This mysterious intuitive pattern recognition reminded me of the creative experience that seems to be so commonly shared amongst human artists.

Demis Hassabis, also a prodigious chess player and the co-founder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind, has tackled the creative mystery as a programmer; proposing there are three different levels of creative difficulty:

1) The ability to develop new combinations within a game like chess.

2) The ability to create a historically new original chess move.

3) The ability to invent an entirely new game like chess, but from scratch.

I trust that as AI climbs up the creative ladder, we will finally understand the true mechanics and hierarchies behind our own creative process.