Among the many features of the mind that humans have chosen to speculate on, few evoke a greater sense of enigma than creativity. Believing that as a cognitive act it stands well beyond the humdrum, we pay special homage to those whose occupations are thought to be intrinsically creative: artists, scientists, writers, musicians, and inventors. Recognizing further that even among them there are a few whose works are so very special and so far transcend the achievements of the rest, we accord them extra reverence; we often bestow on them the appellation “genius”; we wonder, sometimes in awe and not without a tinge of envy, about their mental makeup; and we ponder the nature of the process their minds have enacted in arriving at a particular poem, symphony, theory, or artifact.

We see evidence of this compelling interest in creativity in many distinct forms. The very best type of biography, for instance, embodies an engagement on the part of the biographer with his or her subject's life and work. The biographer's task is to comprehend how childhood, social background, worldview, intellectual influences, personal relationships, and so on may have affected, perhaps even serve as an explanation of, the subject's particular acts of creation. In Richard Ellman's (1982) biography of James Joyce, there is a chapter titled “The Backgrounds [sic] to ‘The Dead’” in which the main elements of this short story – its characters, the setting, even the basic plot – are explained or elucidated by Ellman in terms of Joyce's own background and experience.

This brings us to the end of this particular inquiry. We began with a central concern: the nature of creativity as it is manifested in the development or design of artifacts. Not all acts of design count as creative acts. Like ideas and theories about nature or works of literature and art, the creation of artifacts is deemed creative when the outcome is original in some sense. Drawing on a distinction made by Johnson-Laird (1988a), Boden (1991), and others, we saw that it is possible to establish criteria of originality either from the perspective of the individual agent or from that of the society or community to which the agent belongs. When the outcome of an act of design is an artifactual form that satisfies one or more of the criteria of originality, the design act is called inventive or creative design. More simply, we call it invention. Inventing artifactual forms corresponds to discovering laws or inventing theories about natural phenomena. Thus, it seemed reasonable to suppose that studies of creativity in the natural sciences might provide insight into the nature of creativity in the sciences of the artificial.

We saw that philosophy of science, having been primarily preoccupied with the logic of justification, had little to contribute to our inquiry. Fortunately, there has emerged in relatively recent times a new kind of inquiry into scientific activity that draws on the ideas of cognitive psychology, history of science, and artificial intelligence; it was to these sources we turned.

The main ingredients have now been assembled. We have, first, a computational theory of scientific creativity, CTSC. Its central thesis is that a cognitive act resulting in a scientific product – a solution to a scientific problem – deemed original by the originator or by the relevant scientific community can be specified as, or be explained in the form of, a knowledge-level process.

Second, we have a detailed account of the circumstances attending a particular episode from the arena of computer science: the invention of microprogramming. Since computer science is a science of the artificial, one can regard this invention as signifying the creation of a technological idea, the invention of a new artifactual form that satisfies certain functions or, more prosaically, as an instance of highly original design. In the artificial sciences, these views are virtually indistinguishable.

This historical account is as detailed as the documented evidence will allow. And viewed as a historical explanation, it would appear to be satisfactory. That is, to the question What were the circumstances attending Wilkes's invention of microprogramming? the narrative presented in Chapter 3 would constitute an explanation of the sort historians of science ordinarily produce. It identifies the state of affairs that existed regarding computers and computing circa 1950. It then presents the particular problem that exercised Wilkes (i.e., that of regularity and order in the design of the control unit) and describes, in terms of the known state of affairs (specifically with regard to the EDSAC), how or why the problem arose. The narrative then points out that Wilkes was led to the idea of the diode matrix in the EDSAC order interpreter.

The subject matter of this book is creativity in the realm of invention and design. More specifically, it addresses the issues of how significantly original technological ideas or concepts may be produced by individuals. Questions such as this about the nature of the creative process are, of course, far from new. As Brewster Ghiselin pointed out in his introduction to The Creative Process, an anthology of writings on the topic, interest in creativity can certainly be traced back to the Greeks. It has continued to be thought about and written on ever since.

The premise of this book, however, is a relatively modern idea. It is the belief that it is possible to construct plausible, detailed, testable explanatory accounts of the cognitive processes underlying specific past acts of creation – acts such as the discovery of physical laws, the elucidation of biochemical pathways, or the invention of artifactual forms. The basic intellectual tool to be used in such explanations originates in the modern disciplines of cognitive science and artificial intelligence: It is the idea that computation-like processes of a certain, rather abstract kind can serve as a powerful metaphor with which to probe creativity and that, consequently, it is possible to obtain insight into the nature of specific acts of creation in a way and at a level of detail that has hitherto proved infeasible.

The means by which technological creativity is examined in this book is, in fact, a confluence of three distinct strands. One is the case study approach in which a specific episode from the history of computer technology, widely recognized as a highly original landmark, is singled out for study.

Problem recognition and formulation

The reader will recall from the section “The concept of creativity” in Chapter 1, that the criteria whereby a cognitive process P is deemed creative pertains to the nature of the product Π of that process. It is quite easy to be seduced into assuming, when we talk about Π, that we are really referring to a solution to some problem. This need not be so. Π may, in fact, itself be a problem and P the process of identifying it.

That the recognition of a problem and its formulation in a tractable or solvable form is one of the characteristic features of the creative mind – at least in the realm of scientific discovery and invention – is widely acknowledged (Sternberg 1988b; Root-Bernstein 1989). In the case of the invention of microprogramming, we have seen, according to the account in Chapter 3, that Wilkes was not presented with an “open” problem – that is, a problem already identified and acknowledged within the relevant community. He saw a problem others had not seen. The problem, it will be recalled, was conceptual in nature, having to do with such attributes as regularity and complexity. And as noted in Chapter 3 (section “On the conceptual nature of Wilkes's problem”), the recognition of such a problem by an individual is frequently inspired by a personal philosophical stance or set of values. This seems to have been the case with Wilkes, for, as he has remarked, it was essentially a “private” problem for him. Thus, at least in the case of microprogramming, problem recognition and formulation may be said to constitute an integral part of the overall concept formation activity.

Very few mathematical statements can be judged to be true or false solely by means of direct observation. Some statements, the axioms, have to be accepted as true without too much further argument. Other statements, the theorems, are believed because they are seen as logical consequences of the axioms by means of a proof. Proofs constitute the only effective mechanism for revealing truth in mathematics. We would naturally hope that all provable statements are indeed true. Most of us would also optimistically believe that any true statement has a proof, but such is not the case. Gödel showed that for any reasonably powerful formal system of axioms and inference rules, there are statements that can neither be proved nor disproved on the basis of the axioms and inference rules, and are therefore undecidable. Gödel also showed that for such formal systems, there could be no absolute proof that all provable statements were in fact true. In his proof, Gödel described a machine that could check if a given construction constituted a valid proof. It was hoped that one could similarly define a machine to discover the proof itself, but Church and Turing showed that such a machine could not exist. We show in this book that a machine, the Boyer–Moore theorem prover, can be used to check Gödel's proof of the existence of undecidable sentences.

The construction of an undecidable sentence of Z2 will be completed in this chapter. This construction involves

1. Enumerating Z2 proofs using a one-to-one mapping from Z2 proofs to the natural numbers.

2. Defining a Lisp predicate that searches for the first proof or disproof (i.e., proof of the negation) of the given formula in this enumeration of proofs, and returns T or F, accordingly. Let this “theorem checker” be of the form (Theorem X), where X is the given formula.

3. Using the representability of the above predicate to construct a sentence U which can be seen to assert, “(Theorem u) = F,” where u is the Lisp representation of U. It will be shown that if U is either provable or disprovable in Z2, then it is both provable and disprovable.

The Enumeration of Proofs

Proofs in Z2 are Lisp data structures constructed using Lisp constructors such as Cons, Add1, F-Not, F-Or, Forsome. If we can enumerate all such data structures, then we can also enumerate all Z2 proofs. This enumeration is achieved by mapping these data structures (z-expressions) to n-expressions and, in turn, mapping n-expressions to natural numbers. The mapping from z-expressions to n-expressions is performed by the function GCODE discussed in the previous chapter (page 99). The resulting n-expressions are enumerated by the function Numcode below. If X is a number, (Numcode X) returns the odd number 2X+1.

In the previous chapter we defined a proof-checking program to check formal proofs constructed according to the axioms and rules of inference of the formal system Z2. In order to make progress towards the goal of proving the incompleteness of Z2, we need to formally develop a small amount of mathematics within Z2. While it is true that constructing formal proofs is very tedious, we have no intention of abandoning formalized mathematics. We will show in this chapter that formal proofs can be constructed in bigger and more natural steps by using powerful derived inference rules. These are inference rules whose application can always be eliminated in favor of the primitive axioms and inference rules of Z2. In other words, the soundness of these rules can be proven as a metatheorem. These derived rules do not yield any new theorems but they make the process of formal proof construction more natural and less laborious.

We demonstrate how the Boyer–Moore theorem prover can be used to prove and use derived inference rules to construct nontrivial formal proofs. Most of this chapter is an exposition of one powerful derived inference rule which states that all propositional tautologies are theorems of Z2. We also list several other derived inference rules that were similarly proved.

Metamathematical Extensibility

While it is, in principle, possible to use the proof checker Proves to construct and check formal proofs of interesting theorems, it would require an unrealistic amount of labor.

The Church–Rosser theorem is a central metamathematical result about the lambda calculus. This chapter presents a formalization and proof of the Church–Rosser theorem that was verified using the Boyer–Moore theorem prover. The proof presented in this chapter is based on that of Tait and Martin-Löf. The mechanical proof illustrates the effective use of the Boyer–Moore theörem prover in proof-checking difficult metamathematical proofs. The syntactic representation of terms turns out to be crucial to the mechanical verification. The form of the formalization often significantly influences the ease or difficulty of a verification. We also compare the length of the proof input to the Boyer–Moore prover with the lengths of various informal presentations of proofs of the Church–Rosser theorem.

The lambda calculus was introduced by Church [Bar78a, Chu41] in order to study functions as rules of computation rather than as graphs of argument–value pairs. It was hoped that the lambda calculus would provide an alternative foundation for logic and mathematics. This aim has remained unfulfilled due to the appearance of contradictions when the lambda calculus was extended with logical notions. The lambda calculus has nevertheless been a fruitful medium for the study of functions and computations. The programming language in which the mechanical proof was formalized, a variant of pure Lisp [MAE+65], was one of the first languages whose design was influenced by the lambda calculus.