What is creativity? One new idea may be creative, whereas another is merely new: What's the difference? And how is creativity possible? These questions about human creativity can be answered, at least in outline, using computational concepts. There are two broad types of creativity, improbabilist and impossibilist. Improbabilist creativity involves novel combinations of familiar ideas. A deeper type involves METCS: the mapping, exploration, and transformation of conceptual spaces. It is impossibilist, in that ideas may be generated which – with respect (...) to the particular conceptual space concerned – could not have been generated before. The more clearly conceptual spaces can be defined, the better we can identify creative ideas. Defining conceptual spaces is done by musicologists, literary critics, and historians of art and science. Humanist studies, rich in intuitive subtleties, can be complemented by the comparative rigour of a computational approach. Computational modelling can help to define a space, and to show how it may be mapped, explored, and transformed. Impossibilist creativity can be thought of in “classical” Al terms, whereas connectionism illuminates improbabilist creativity. Most Al models of creativity can only explore spaces, not transform them, because they have no self-reflexive maps enabling them to change their own rules. A few, however, can do so. A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization. (shrink)

This piece is a commentary on a precis of Maggie Boden's book "The creative mind" published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

We introduce a general technique for finding sets of axioms for a given class of semigroups. To illustrate the technique, we provide new sets of defining axioms for groups of exponent n, bands, and semilattices.

In the 1920s Heyting attempted at axiomatizing constructive geometry. Recently, von Plato used different concepts to axiomatize it. He used 14 axioms to formulate constructive apartness geometry, seven of which have occurrences of negation. In this paper we show with the help of ANDP, a theorem prover based on natural deduction, that four new axioms without negation, shorter and more intuitive, can replace seven of von Plato's 14 ones. Thus we obtained a near negation-free new system consisting of 11 axioms.

In the 1920s, Heyting attempted at axiomatizing constructive geometry. Recently, von Plato used different concepts to axiomatize the geometry: he used 14 axioms to describe the axiomatization for apartness geometry. Then he added axioms A1 and A2 to his apartness geometry to get his affine geometry, then he added axioms O1, O2, O3 and O4 to the affine geometry to get orthogonality. In total, this gives 22 axioms. von Plato used four relations to describe the concept of orthogonality in O1, (...) O2 and O4. That is, all the three relations of two lines, which are convergence, unorthogonality and difference, and the relation of a point and a line. ANDP is an automated natural deduction prover developed over the years at our institute. After doing a lot of experiments using ANDP, much shorter and more intuitive axioms were found for axioms O1, O2 and O4, respectively. For example, O2 can be replaced by one of its four conjuncts. This paper shows that it is enough to use two relations on lines, which are convergence and unorthogonality, to describe the concept of orthogonality. (shrink)

A connection between Aristotle's syllogistic and the calculus of relations is investigated. Aristotle's and Gergonne's syllogistics are considered as some algebraic structures. It is proved that Gergonne's syllogistic is isomorphic to closed elements algebra of a proper approximation relation algebra. This isomorphism permits to evaluate Gergonne's syllogisms and also Aristotle's syllogisms, laws of conversion and relations in the "square of oppositions" by means of regular computations with Boolean matrices.