7 Automating Creativity

Ada Lovelace is widely considered the world's first programmer. She was the first to write programs for Charles Babbage's Analytic Engine, a very ambitious but never realized mechanical computer, in the mid-nineteenth century. She was also among the first to point out the truly marvelous potential of computing machines. In her view, however, the “Analytical Engine has no pretentions whatsoever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” In the last century and a half we have seen massive progress in computing, in particular since the invention of the actual digital computers. However, surprisingly many would still believe something like the following: Although we can make computers play games, predict what players will do, and even associate certain player behaviors with personality characteristics, the computers could never design the games themselves. For that, we need human creativity because computers can never fundamentally create something that we humans didn't program them to do first.