Insightful artificial intelligence

In March 2016, DeepMind’s computer program AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world-champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play, and has been recognized as “creative” by the AI and Go communities. This paper examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I conclude that although AlphaGo lacks one important aspect of creative problem solving found in animals (domain generality) it exhibits a different capacity for creativity: namely, a superhuman ability to transform a conceptual space within a particular domain. This analysis has consequences for how we think about creativity in humans and AI.Leverhulme Trust, Templeton World Charity Foundatio