A tower design competition was held for the 1889 Paris World Exhibition. The winner was Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. No less than 68 designs were submitted. The designs all bore some similarity to the Eiffel Tower but were still different, since every designer has a unique design style.
This leads me to the subject of creativity. Creativity can lead to a diversity of solutions for a narrowly defined problem.
Understand the ‘how’
In thermodynamics, when a person creates something that wasn’t there before, it is called “noise”; there is an “output signal” that we cannot infer from the input.
This is a playful comparison that does not do justice to creative people, but it means that if we want computers to be creative, they must have a method to be creative.
They need a smart program for smart, non-trivial solutions. For that to happen, people must understand the “how” of their own creativity.
One of the first “computers” was an 18th century weaving machine that was programmed by punched holes in a card. This punched-card idea was adapted by IBM founder Herman Hollerith for the 1890 U.S. census. The rest is history.
Racing the brain
The brain has some 100 billion neurons. That leads to a number of possible interconnection patterns. Assuming each neuron can fire 10 to 20 times a second, the brain’s information processing capacity is in the order of 1023bit/s.
When can we make a chip with that capacity?
Applying Moore’s Law and assuming a continued increase in processing capacity by a factor of 10 every five years or so, we cannot expect to have the required capacity before 2070.
Be pragmatic
The creative computer may not become a reality anytime soon. But the principles of creative behavior and learning are already being applied in clever ways in our browsers, our communications, our planning tools and our user interfaces.
Being creative requires us to be pragmatic at the same time: While we strive for perfection, let’s not try to reach it immediately.
- Cees Jan Koomen
Entrepreneur and Founder, Point-One Innovation Fund
