The younger people got, on the other hand, a different way of thinking on computational creativity. Mark Riedl came up with a great idea for automatic storytelling (dividing the problem of telling a story into smaller subproblems called vignettes. An analogy could be drawn here between story/integrals, vignette/differentials. At least that’s how I think about them). Will Byrne was the only one who defined computational creativity in terms of problem solving, which, I think, is the way to go in this field. (Most of the baldies are still stuck on the «computationally creative is anything made by a machine that we would deem creative in humans» kind of definition. How is any branch of science going to evolve with such ‘definitions’? I guess that’s the burden of being Maggie Boden’s followers.

One thing that surprised me, was that nobody even mentioned chess programs, or games of any kind for that matter. (No, wait. Nick did. The three times he appeared on stage. By the way, the integration of MEXICA and nn was universally regarded by the part of the audience I could talk to as a match made in heaven.) Anyway, that’s a field of study that could have a bright future. After all, there’s not much money on creative painting programs, but in games, now there’s a lot.