Originally posted by bricker42
I think it all comes down to: "can you define GOOD?". If you can express, programmitcally, the qualities of a good layout, you could sic a program on generating random layouts and only keeping the ones that fit its definition of "good".
To define "good", you could have another program that started with a very general description of "good", then showed layouts from the first program to a panel of users to evaluate. It would then look for correlations in layouts that were deemed "good" by the panel of users.
Complicated, maybe, but certainly easier than writing software to book airline tickets for a person over the phone (done at MIT) or play a really mean game of chess.
I think there's something else to it: "good" doesn't mean the same thing to different people (nor creative; we can see that from one of the previous posts where author has not much respect for "electronic" music, though some consider it creative).
We have examples of "creative" in history of arts where "bull****" (in the sense of previous art; consider "modern" art and some of the completely blank paintings which resulted from it -- of course, really creative) turned to be a better form of creativity.
Currently, I believe the only problem with "computer creativity" to be the lack of real randomness (most, if not all, RNG's in computers are pseudo-random number generators).
When it comes to rest, it's all a matter of pattern and template we're used to. Someone mentioned that there couldn't be too much layouts which are deemed acceptable, and rightly so. It's known that "mathematics" is quite "creative" (consider fractals, and lots of other functions), and maths is something what can (in a large number of cases) easily be implemented on a computer.
Next, we must ask if there really exists a creativity like most want to think of it? Is what we (I proudly believe I am one of them :)) humans actually do any sort of incognitive (sorry if this is not a correct negation of word cognitive; english is not my native language) process, or actually a mere selection of choices from pre-learned "truths" (like, black goes nice with red, blue with green etc).
I believe it to be the latter, and don't recognize any creativity whatsoever (this is a BIG lie, there is creativity involved in any process humans do, except mechanical stuff -- the question is could it be delimited like it's commonly done?).
I hope to raise some interesting points for all of you, and not to bore you severely.
Best regards.
PS. If not anything else, my english will probably be amusing :)