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#4856·Knut Sondre Sæbø, about 11 hours agoI think the core of universal creativity isn't about efficiency, it's the open-ended capacity to restructure what counts as a problem, a solution, and relevant data. Creativity is (at least partially) the ability to reformulate the problem space itself, not by ironing out implications of existing theories. An AI and computational systems is already good at ironing out the implications in our language and existing knowledge systems. But that's search within a given space, not the creation of a new one. Creativity seems to work on a higher level. It's operating at the level of problem framing, which requires things like relevance. An AI can't create new relevance, because its weights are a statistical compression of what humans have already found relevant. It inherits a frame; it doesn't generate one.
I think this shows that tractability can't do the work the bounty asks. Tractability is defined relative to a fixed problem space. But universal creativity is (at least partially) the capacity to restructure the space, to change what counts as a problem, a solution, and relevant data.
An interesting example from cognitive science is the Mutilated Chessboard Problem, which asks whether a board with two same-coloured corners removed can be tiled by dominoes. As a tiling problem the search space is combinatorially explosive. But reframe it as a colour problem and the answer is easy. Every domino covers one black and one white square, and you have unequal numbers of each. The solution came not from searching harder, but from seeing the problem differently.