Thoughts on improving one's creativity.

Creativity is a topic that I’ve been interested in recently. What is creativity? How can one be creative?

Creativity is simply the process of coming up with a new solution to a known problem. A lot of the problems one encounters in life have so many solutions that it is possible to come up with one more. To be considered a creative solution, the idea should not only be novel but also represent a significant improvement over known ideas. The people who research this topic have pointed out that there are different types of creativity. Margaret Boden for example lists three.
1. Combinational creativity.
2. Exploratory creativity.
3. Transformational creativity.

Combinational creativity is taking two known ideas and combining them in a novel way to make a new one.

Exploratory creativity is just making changes to a known solution till you get a new one. Very often this might not result in dramatic improvements. But it is possible to imagine that one gets a significantly different solution after many improvements have been added to the existing solution. The creation of new species through evolution is an example.

Transformational creativity is a category of ideas that are just new and cannot be thought to have been derived from anything else that has existed before. These are the sort of ideas that make you think that they are “truly original”. These usually come about when one thinks about a problem in a way it has never been thought of before.

Can we now try to think of how one might go about finding new solutions? The combinational approach is the easiest to do. List down all attributes that you are looking for in your solution. Look at known solutions to the problem. There is a good chance that some of these solution do some of what you want. Find a set of known solutions which spans all your requirements. You now need to combine these solutions into a new one.

A second approach would be to do a set of what-if experiments. Try to change things in a way you think will take it towards filling up the missing requirements. Chances are you will stumble upon a way to solve your problem. You could also try to map your problem to a similar problem in a different domain and see how people have dealt with the new domain. You might find a solution that applies in that domain that does what you want. This thought process might give you clues about how you can solve the problem in your domain.

The brightest ideas come about when people take a problem and think about it in a totally new way. It is not clear to me if there is a set of axioms that people use in such an approach. It is usually possible for people who get such ideas to explain the new idea using known things. It is seen that such an explanation can be advanced only after the idea has been generated though. I find that such ideas have an air of obviousness to them. The obviousness is however only as a result of hindsight though. One can track the idea down to one or more of the fundamental assumptions about known solutions having been changed.

An approach to take would be list down all the fundamental assumptions that form the part of your approach to solving the problem. You could then try to think of ways to solve the problem with one or more of the assumptions removed or changed.

I find that engineers have a preference for the exploratory style. We like to make small changes to a known solution. Usually the benefits are small as well. Another small change is then identified and so on. I think such an approach is acceptable for “optimization” type problems where one is not looking for a dramatic improvement. I don’t see this way of working resulting in very major improvements. A preference for such an approach prevents engineers from reducing the problem to its basics to look for a fundamentally different solution. One needs to make a conscious attempt to restrict the time spent in such activities. They have a way of using up a lot of people’s time. I think it makes more sense to abandon this approach if the first few things you change don’t have the desired outcome. This way of solving the problem is very much like evolution. It takes a long time to make an impact. It would be useful to realize that there are other ways to be creative as well. That could motivate people to break the loop and think of other “ways” of being creative.

I’ll need to mention that no one invents anything following any of the approaches listed above. I’m of the opinion that these are just ways to prepare your mind. My personal experience suggests that I spend a lot of time thinking about a problem using these approaches. Then something happens and an idea is born. Chance, they say, favors the prepared mind. I’m only suggesting ways to prepare your mind.

Happy inventing. May the force be with you!

Intelligence, Infallibility and Creativity.

I've been reading Roger Penrose's book "Shadows of the Mind". The book makes rather interesting reading and makes one think a lot about a bunch of things that most of us don't think about much.

The basic point the book tries to make it that the human brain is more than a computing machine. One quote from Turing that caught my attention was
If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. There are several mathematical theorems which say almost exactly that. But these theorems say nothing about how much intelligence may be displayed if a machine makes no pretence at infallibility.

The quote somehow suggests that just a little bit of "fallibility" would go a long way in making machines intelligent and possibly suggests that allowing for a few mistakes will allow machines to reach the level of human intelligence. Clearly computers are better than humans at performing tasks using known procedures. I suspect that "creativity" or the ability to generate "new" ideas would be considered an important attribute of "Humans" that the machine would be expected to match.

A honest look at myself suggests that the machine would be required to be very significantly fallible. I find that a lot of the "ideas" that I come up with do not actually work well. I would conservatively state that about one in ten of my ideas do end up surviving serious scrutiny. I also know quite a few people (who I consider intelligent) who have at various times indicated that the ratio of "correct" to "incorrect" ideas they have is quite low and in the order of one in ten.

In my own work on successive approximation ADCs, I've found many instances where allowing circuits to make errors results in the system working better than trying to make the circuit "correct" at all times. The idea of error correction and redundancy are quite commonly used in many circuits to improve the performance of the circuit itself. My experience with such circuits suggests that one needs to allow significant errors before the advantages become significant.

In the biological sciences one encounters the phenomenon of evolution as a case where the fallibility of the DNA replication process results in the origin of new species over time. DNA replication is a very accurate process which is probably why evolution takes such a long time. It is also quite possible that the "randomness" of the process also contributes to the slow pace at which new species are "created". This could also suggest that human creativity is not entirely a random process. It can also be argued that "creativity" is not deterministic either since it is not clear what determines the "creation". The even more bizarre phenomenon of intuition probably plays a bigger part in human creativity.

One question to the readers of this blog is "What fraction of the new ideas you get end up being valid once you put them to serious scrutiny?" I would appreciate if you could leave that answer as a comment.

I also found myself wondering if "creativity" is indeed a result of intelligence. Again a simple first person introspection throws up an alternative view. Lets say I want to solve a new problem that I've encountered. My intelligence tries to solve the problem using all the tricks it already knows. Some of these tricks are useful and make some headway towards finding the solution. A lot of these tricks are however not useful and don't contribute much. A lot of effort goes into solving the problem after which a "flash of intuition" occurs which presents the "creative" solution. Another mechanism that generates the "flash of intuition" is listening to some one else describing how they have solved the problem. One goes about hearing and understanding the other person and suddenly a new idea emerges. I don't remember a time when I got a brilliant idea that solves a problem that I've not spent a lot of time thinking about.

I'm wondering if creativity occurs only when intelligence is put out of the way. In other words, creativity occurs only intelligence has been "satisfied" and/or "exhausted". One might even be tempted to argue that intelligence has been a hurdle to overcome before the creative process kicks in. There are many examples one hears where experts in a field fail to see a simple solution while a lay man who just happens to walk past offers a shockingly better solution. I know a lot of people who point out that they have been working in the same area for too long and find themselves unable to be as innovative as they had been in the past (I'm saturated feeling). It is quite possible that such "experts" will need to exhaust a large bag of tricks they already possess before they can think of a new solution to the problem.

It would be interesting to think of ways to "satisfy" one's intelligence as a way to improve ones creativity. Clearly working very hard on a problem is one way. Reading or listening to others who have solved similar problems is another. A better alternative would be brainstorming where a group of people discuss the problem in detail. Usually a lot of ideas are discussed in such sessions and quite often people do end up getting some bright ideas in the end.