A preliminary framework for description, analysis and comparison of creative systems

I summarise and attempt to clarify some concepts presented in and arising from Margaret Boden’s (1990) descriptive hierarchy of creativity, by beginning to formalise the ideas she proposes. The aim is to move towards a model which allows detailed comparison, and hence better understanding, of systems which exhibit behaviour which would be called ‘‘creative’’ in humans. The work paves the way for the description of naturalistic, multi-agent creative AI systems, which create in a societal context. I demonstrate some simple reasoning about creative behaviour based on the new framework, to show how it might be useful for the analysis and study of creative systems. In particular, I identify some crucial properties of creative systems, in terms of the framework components, some of which may usefully be proven a priori of a given system. I suggest that Boden’s descriptive framework, once elaborated in detail, is more uniform and more powerful than it first appears. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.