Towards Defining, Measuring, and Leveraging Creativity in AI Applications

A paper posted to arXiv (2610.12845v1) proposes formal postulates and a conceptual mathematical definition of creativity grounded in Boden's three criteria — newness, value, and surprise — and validates the formula in two applications: scoring the creativity of particular chess moves and assessing paintings by artists including Picasso and Renoir. Experimental results show the formula captured creative patterns in both the chess and art domains, suggesting creativity can be characterized through a unified mathematical structure whose measurements are adapted per domain.

arXiv:2610.12845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite extensive research, computational creativity still lacks a conceptually grounded, practically relevant, and empirically applicable formal definition across contexts such as art, scientific research, and games. Existing approaches to creativity often focus on proposing informal conceptual definitions without providing formal computational concepts. Alternatively, they propose formal definitions without carefully examining their underlying assumptions or providing validation of these definitions by testing their performance in specific application settings. To address these problems, this paper proposes several formal postulates of creativity grounded in prior psychological work on creativity, especially as related to Boden's three core criteria of creativity: newness, value, and surprise. Furthermore, we propose a conceptual mathematical definition of creativity that aligns with these postulates. We also validate our proposed creativity formula in two applications: determining the creativity of particular chess moves, and assessing the creativity of paintings by some artists, such as Picasso, Renoir, and other painters. Experimental results demonstrate that our formula of creativity successfully captures creative patterns across both the chess and the art domains. This suggests that creativity can be effectively characterized through a unified mathematical structure based on three fundamental criteria, namely newness, value, and surprise, whose specific measurements are adapted to the particular domains.