How is it possible to think new thoughts? What is creativity and can science explain it? And just how did Coleridge dream up the creatures of The Ancient Mariner? When The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms was first published, Margaret A. Boden's bold and provocative exploration of creativity broke new ground. Boden uses examples such as jazz improvisation, chess, story writing, physics, and the music of Mozart, together with computing models from the field of artificial intelligence to uncover the nature (...) of human creativity in the arts. The second edition of The Creative Mind has been updated to include recent developments in artificial intelligence, with a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author. It is an essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind. (shrink)

An essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind, "The Creative Mind" has been updated to include recent developments in artificial ...

This long-awaited work by prominent Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn integrates a twenty-year research program on the nature of high-level vision and mental ...

PARTI The Philosophical Situation: A Critical Appraisal We must begin with the mistake and find out the truth in it. That is, we must uncover the source of ...

Cases where analogy has played a significant role in the formation of a new scientific concept are well-documented. Yet, how is it that genuinely new representations can be constructed from existing representations? It is argued that the process of ‘generic modeling’ enables abstraction of features common to both the domain of the source of the analogy and of the target phenomena. The analysis focuses on James Clerk Maxwell's construction of the electromagnetic field concept. The mathematical representation Maxwell constructed turned out (...) to be a system of abstract laws that when applied to electromagnetic systems yield laws of a dynamical system that will not map back onto the mechanicals domains used in their construction. (shrink)

We examine the use of analogy in human thinking from the perspective of a multiconstraint theory, which postulates three basic types of constraints: similarity, structure and purpose. The operation of these constraints is apparent in both laboratory experiments on analogy and in naturalistic settings, including politics, psychotherapy, and scientific research. We sketch how the multiconstraint theory can be implemented in detailed computational simulations of the analogical human mind.

This paper describes DIVA (Dynamic Imagery for Visual Analogy), a computational model of visual imagery based on the scene graph, a powerful representational structure widely used in computer graphics. Scene graphs make possible the visual display of complex objects, including the motions of individual objects. Our model combines a semantic-network memory system with computational procedures based on scene graphs. The model can account for people’s ability to produce visual images of moving objects, in particular the ability to use dynamic visual (...) analogies that compare two systems of objects in motion. (shrink)