Role of Simplicity in Creative Behaviour: The Case of the Poietic Generator
This work addresses the problem of understanding creative behavior for researchers in psychology or AI, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing theory to a new context.
The authors applied Simplicity Theory to model interest in creative situations, deriving a decision rule for a simplified creative game called the Poietic Generator, which produced an elementary form of creativity as a proof of principle.
We propose to apply Simplicity Theory (ST) to model interest in creative situations. ST has been designed to describe and predict interest in communication. Here we use ST to derive a decision rule that we apply to a simplified version of a creative game, the Poietic Generator. The decision rule produces what can be regarded as an elementary form of creativity. This study is meant as a proof of principle. It suggests that some creative actions may be motivated by the search for unexpected simplicity.