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Abstract. Creativity studies focus on the processes that produce creative arti-facts and how we evaluate an artifact to determine if it is creative. This paper claims that we need to formalize an evaluation metric that is independent of the entity, or process, that is being creative and defines three essential criteria: novelty, value, and surprising. Novelty can be measured as a distance from other artifacts in the space, characterizing the artifact as similar but different. To distinguish this from novelty, value is a measure of the artifact’s performance rather than a measure of how the artifact’s description differs from other artifacts in its class. A metric for value has to accommodate that a creative artifact can change the value system by introducing a performance or function that did not exist in the set of known artifacts. The measurement for surprising looks for patterns in the recent past and how we develop expectations for the next new artifact in a class.
Mary Lou Maher (Mon,) studied this question.