A system using n-grams for visualizing the human tendency to repeat the same patterns and the difficulty of divergent thinking

One of the factors that inhibits creative thinking is that humans tend to think in the same patterns repetitively and cannot easily come up with a totally new combination of concepts. In other words, humans are not talented at evenly exploring combinatorial space. In order to visualize how strong this tendency is, we implemented a system that asks users to type a long sequence of numbers and then evaluates the frequency of the appearance of the same subsequences, or n-grams. This system can also be used to train oneself to avoid such tendency. We call it “the Creativity Test”. The reason for the name is because we believe that efficiency in exploring a wider part of a combinatorial space without being caught in few patterns is important for divergent thinking, which constitutes an integral part of creativity. When we tested the system on a group of participants, we discovered that, for most of them, surprisingly long subsequences appeared repeatedly, making the participants realize how inefficient they were at coming up with new combinations.