A Formal Theory of Creativity to Model the Creation of Art

According to the Formal Theory of Creativity (1990–2010), a creative agent—one that never stops generating non-trivial, novel, and surprising behaviours and data—must have two learning components: a general reward optimiser or reinforcement learner, and an adaptive encoder of the agent’s growing data history (the record of the agent’s interaction with its environment). The learning progress of the encoder is the intrinsic reward for the reward optimiser. That is, the latter is motivated to invent interesting spatio-temporal patterns that the encoder does not yet know but can easily learn to encode better with little computational effort. To maximise expected reward (in the absence of external reward), the reward optimiser will create more and more-complex behaviours that yield temporarily surprising (but eventually boring) patterns that make the encoder quickly improve. I have argued that this simple principle explains science, art, music and humour. It is possible to rigorously formalise it and implement it on learning machines, thus building artificial robotic scientists and artists equipped with curiosity and creativity. I summarise my work on this topic since 1990, and present a previously unpublished low-complexity artwork computable by a very short program discovered through active search for novel patterns according to the principles of the theory.