The first step on a long road, paved with LaTeX tiles and with a gleaming thesis at the end

Today I wrote the first words of my thesis.

Well...

For a while now I've had a thesis plan and a collection of chapter headings and subheadings - but no content. Now today I've started filling in the content.

What I've written today is very much for a first draft, full of [*** NOTES AND REMINDERS ***] and other aesthetically pleasing annotations. I should imagine that at least half of what I've written gets moved around, edited, or discarded, as I get more used to thesis writing.

But...

The first steps have now been taken on this PhD writing-up journey. After an apprehensive start of not knowing what on earth I was going to write as the first words, I just wrote something. Anything. Then changed it. Lo and behold, I'd started writing up. It feels good!

expertise of programmer vs expertise of the programmer's program

It's not often I directly disagree with Maggie Boden but...
"only an expert in a given domain can write interesting programs modeling that domain"
[Margaret Boden 1994, What is Creativity? in Dimensions of Creativity p. 115]

(my brain is now busily plotting how to write a painting program)

A question of definition

Some questions have been going around my head recently, in the context of what creativity is. These questions have been along this theme: Are the defining characteristics of creativity actually just multiple recastings of the same thing?

• Can a discovery be useful but not interesting? 
• Similarly, can a discovery be interesting but not useful?

This was inspired by Colton et al 2000, which looked at how 'interestingness' was evaluated by mathematical discovery systems. Here are some more developed thoughts: 

[Q. Can a discovery be useful without being interesting? I think NO in this domain because if some previously undiscovered concept or conjecture is useful then it has interest because it can be used. 

Q. How about in other domains? Depends on what interestingness means in those domains. 

Q. How domain-specific is interestingness-and how generalised can it be?

In pure maths something is interesting if it helps you progress, therefore interestingness and utility are tied together this way. 

Q. In other domains, can discoveries be useful without being interesting? yes e.g. if they are a means to an end and if it is not your primary concern - I guess this applies to maths too - most maths conjectures are not interesting to me - unless I can see them being useful to me or in solving a notorious problem.

Q. Can things can be interesting without being useful e.g. Doug Zongker's "Chicken" paper is interesting but not useful except as amusement (so does it have some value here in its humour - which is of course its main purpose? Hmmm I can't think of things which are interesting but not useful in some sort of way...)]

Continuing on this line of thought:

• Is there any difference between things that are surprising and things that are novel [and can I just use novelty to explain both?]

[Surprisingness is linked into novelty - if something is seen before it is less surprising. But there is more to surprisingness than this  - e.g. the result of a process may be surprising not because it is unseen but because it is derived in a different way - so... in a novel way...?]

References

Colton, S. and Bundy, A. and Walsh, T. (2000) On the notion of interestingness in automated mathematical discovery. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (53) pp.351-375

Zongker, D. (2006) Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken. Annals of Improbable Research (12) pp.16-21