Abstract
The objective of the present article is a) to explain humans’ high creativity in non-mystic and unambiguous terms, b) to evaluate the performance of problem-solving computer programs and c) to make suggestions about future designs of heuristics. Unlike many previous attempts in the past century, we sought inspiration from two sources that had been neglected or excluded from considerations by experts: artificial intelligence and introspections of a number of highly creative individuals, who confessed that they had a penchant for visual thinking. Simonton’s chance-configuration model was refurbished accordingly. It is now possible for the refurbished model to explain a number of outstanding puzzles that had eluded our predecessors: a) what intuition is, b) why creators had no idea about their source of inspiration even after the fact, c) a peculiar event happening at the discovery time, known as the “aha” phenomenon, d) a type of accidental discoveries known as serendipity. Moreover, the elusive concept of abduction advanced by philosopher Charles Peirce is actually visual thinking in disguise. Blessed with this new understanding, we could evaluate the performance of a number of problem-solving computer programs from a cognitive point of view. It turned out that the common thread that links human creativity and computer-based creative problem solving is heuristic searching. Recognizing that a digital computer must perform heuristic searching in a digital environment, which is not the most user-friendly environment to do so, we made suggestions about how to circumvent the restrictions without sacrificing the principles in future designs of heuristics.
Highlights
The thought process of geniuses or individuals with superior mental abilities has captured the fascination of philosophers and scientists since the inception of these professions
The mystery of human creativity was dramatically captured by a remark of mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss
It is hard to deny that it was creativity that brought about civilization
Summary
The thought process of geniuses or individuals with superior mental abilities has captured the fascination of philosophers and scientists since the inception of these professions. If finding a satisfactory explanation of humans’ creative problem solving is itself a process of problem solving, one way to do it is searching for a recognizable pattern among creativity models of the past century This approach is tantamount to recognizing an emerging pattern from reports of the proverbial three blind men who attempted to figure out what an elephant looks like by touching different body parts of the elephant. All the above-mentioned models, when taken together, essentially conclude that the search-and-match (solution-generating) phase invokes non algorithmizable process variously known as intuition, insight, inspiration, and primary-process thinking, which are essentially a Gestalt process of (visual) pattern recognition. In emphasizing the difference in thinking styles between geniuses and dumb high-achievers, I inadvertently gave an impression that creative people do not invoke rule-based reasoning to find solutions. A sufficient number of anecdotes may accumulate, rending the observations evidence-based
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