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

43 Dodgy Statements on Computer Art - Brian Reffin Smith

Some really interesting statements here, whether or not you agree with all of them. From Brian Reffin Smith's blog. My favourite is #41...

http://zombiepataphysics.blogspot.com/2010/03/43-dodgy-statements-on-computer-art.html

Journals

Went to a fairly non-eventful research training session today, on scientific writing. Beyond this quite useful wikiversity link on how to write in a scientific way, the only real benefit I got from this (apart from a break from marking!) was to think about what journals I want to be aiming for, for publication.

As my research focus has shifted away from music and towards creativity and evaluation this year, many of the journals I have been used to looking at have become less relevant. So now I've set up some content alerts for some new journals and need to get used to looking at different journals (ideally I want to set aside some time for this each week to browse some journal content).

Here's a list of the journals that are quite relevant for me (along with some journals on music/AI that I prob will still find interesting but not necessarily useful for my current work):

• Creativity Research Journal (impact factor 0.57)
• Lecture notes in AI
• Lecture notes in CS (probably not so relevant anymore really)
  
• Leonardo (and related journals)
  
• Digital Creativity
  
• Cognitive Science (impact factor 2.179)
  
• Topics in Cognitive Science (impact factor 9.389)
  
• Cognitive Science: A multidisciplinary journal
  
• Minds and Machines
  
• Journal of Creative Behaviour (0.429) (we don't get it)
  
• Creativity
  
• Creative Review (not peer reviewed, doesn't look that relevant)
  
• Psychology of aesthetics, creativity and the arts
  
• Evaluation
  
• Evaluation review
  
• Research evaluation
  
  
• AISB quarterly (not really a journal..!)

Music-related journals:

• Journal of New Music Research
  
• Computer Music Journal
  
• Psychology of Music
  
• Music Perception
  
• Musicae Scientae
  
• Journal of interdisciplinary music studies
  
• Journal of music and meaning
• Contemporary music review
  

Time plan for work for the next 18 months...

This timeplan looks super organised but was actually the result of a long train journey, the back of an envelope, a desire to stop reading papers and a slight panic about whether it was even possible to finish my PhD in three years. Time will tell - but now I have some real motivation to stick to this plan - it shows it may even be possible! Here's hoping I stick to it...

Times they are a changin...

It's been a busy few days or so in the land of Anna's PhD.

I've been really worrying about how I'm half way through my study in terms of time and seem to have done barely nothing towards a thesis. After a meeting with my supervisor yesterday which pretty much highlighted that, at first I came away very disheartened with everything and locked myself in the library for a bit. But today after a good gig last night and seeing friends, I feel so much more positive.

I've done some major clearing up things since then:

• Cleared my shelf of most of the library books which I 'perhaps maybe' might get round to reading... what's the point in holding onto books when I don't feel like I've got enough time or brain cells to get through the essential reading?
  
• Called a halt to one of the projects I'm working on, one which relates GOFAI story generation to music generation - I am hitting so many obstacles with it and it's not central enough to my PhD to warrant any more attention. I am going to write up the work I've done and the conclusions I've drawn from doing this work, both as an exercise in academic writing and to document my work so it's not wasted. If there were no dead ends in research then I guess it wouldn't be as much fun?
• Been very honest about exactly what I do and don't want to achieve in my PhD research (why cram a whole lifetime's worth of research into one degree and eventually fail because of the enormity of it all?)
  
• Done some serious thinking about what I want my thesis to contribute - gonna do a bit more brainstorming on this and open my mind up but I want to focus it much more on the thorny problem of evaluating the presence and amount of creativity being demonstrated by a selection of 'creative' computational systems.

Obviously it's really time to get some serious work done now, so I'll finish writing this and clear some things off my to do list. Speaking of which...

floundering under a sea of books

Looking at the pile of books around my desk at the moment, I am finding several that I really haven't gotten around to reading yet, that I have had out on loan from the library or have acquired some other way, for a shameful amount of time. 

Some of these books have been key references for me - Wiggins and Delieges book on musical creativity, Lerdahl and Jackendoff's book A Generative theory of tonal music, various books on creativity or emergence, Bregman's Auditory Scene Analysis - the list goes on and on.

Let's face it - even if I sat down and did nothing else but read the books in my shelves, I still couldn't read all of them properly, page-by-page, and in any case I don't have that luxury with time. 

So a new approach is required - I'm going to train myself to be able to pick and choose content better from these books. I need to be stricter and really focus my attention on my research area of musical creativity. Which means, for example, that the Lerdahl and Jackendoff book is only useful to me (right now) for a small project I'm doing on the crossover between musical creativity and creativity in language use, so I should give it the appropriate level of attention and then return it so other people can read it. 

I've kept very sporadic notes from the reading I have done so far, so as of now I'm going to keep these notes electronically and file them together, otherwise they're impossible to find. I guess this blog would be a good place to do this, so quite a few future posts will be my thoughts and notes from books I've read over the past year and a half as well as future books. In a way this will be good anyway, to review what I have read - I'm sure that 75% at least of this reading has gone out of my head by now...