3 types of creativity - Interpolative, Extrapolative, and Inventing Go

February 20, 2024 at 03:22 PM

Note: This is not a blog, it's a semi-private digital garden with mostly first drafts that are often co-written with an LLM. Unless I shared this link with you directly, you might be missing important context or reading an outdated perspective.

This has been living rent free in my head ever since I watched the interview with Demis.

So, I have three categories of originality or creativity. The most basic, mundane form is just interpolation, which is like averaging what you see. So if I said to a system, "Come up with a new picture of a cat," and it's seen a million cats, it produces some kind of average of all the ones it's seen. In theory, that's an original cat because you won't find that exact average in the specific examples, but it's pretty boring. I wouldn't really call that creativity—that's the lowest level.

The next level is what AlphaGo exhibited, which is extrapolation. It takes all the games humans have ever played, plays another 10 million games on top of that, and then comes up with a new strategy that no human has ever seen before. That’s Move 37—revolutionizing Go, even though we've played it for thousands of years. That’s pretty incredible, and it could be very useful in science. That’s why I got very excited about that and started doing things like AlphaFold, because clearly, extrapolating beyond what's already in the training set could be extremely useful. So that's already very valuable and, I think, truly creative.

But there's one level above that, which humans can do—invention. Can you invent a game? If I specify at an abstract level: it takes five minutes to learn the rules but a lifetime—or many lifetimes—to master, it's aesthetically beautiful, it encompasses some sort of mystical part of the universe, it's beautiful to look at, but you can play a game in a human afternoon, in two hours. That would be a high-level specification of Go.

Some questions left to ponder: