Muzak, not Mozart

What is creativity? Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and Oxford professor for the public understanding of science, offers this pert definition in his introduction: ‘Creativity is the drive to come up with something that is new and surprising and that has value.’ This, he argues, is possible in mathematics (he himself invented a new kind of symmetrical object) as well as the arts in general, or what he describes as ‘the outpourings of what I call the human code’. The question he sets himself in this book is: can Artificial Intelligence do as well, or even better?

Du Sautoy’s use of the phrase ‘the human code’ for the software that is allegedly running in our heads makes the comparison more flattering to computers: after all, if one kind of code can write novels, why not another? Maybe, indeed, there is even a ‘creativity code’, as the title calls it, that, once cracked, could enable any human or machine entity to become a genius. There is, of course, a large business appetite for books that explain creativity, which has not been best served since Jonah Lehrer’s notorious Imagine: How Creativity Works, which was withdrawn from sale after it was discovered to have made up quotes by Bob Dylan.

Spoiler: there is actually no creativity code, and AI can’t yet perform artistic feats that are plausibly human. The interest of this book is really the journey, as our author travels around various labs to be shown the state-of-the-art in machine learning. Whereas programmers used to try to tell a computer everything it ought to do, the current art is to make a program that can learn as it goes along. So it was with AlphaGo, the Go-playing program that beat the board game’s human world champion a few years ago, having learned by playing millions of training games against itself.