Enhancing Creativity with Niche Construction
Jon McCormack · 2010
We address the question of how processes from evolutionary biological ecosystems can be abstracted and beneficially applied in creative domains. Evolution is a process capable of generating appropriate (fit) novelty in biological systems, so it is interesting to ask if it can do so in other, nonbiological systems. Past approaches have focused on optimisation via fitness evaluation (either machine representable or human evaluated), but this is ill-suited to creative systems, as creativity is not necessarily an optimisation process. Our approach is to consider the creative system as a virtual evolutionary ecosystem, specifically adopting the process of niche construction. We show how the abstracted niche construction process can be applied to an agent-based line drawing system, enhancing the diversity and heterogeneity of drawings produced over a version without niche construction.