THE CREATIVITY CODE

Art and Innovation in the Age of A.I.

By Marcus Du Sautoy

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Du Sautoy, a British mathematician, wants to answer the question: “Can computers be creative?” He parses the actions involved in creativity — exploring, combining and transforming — and reveals the history of A.I. through the turning points in which machine learning has progressed toward these milestones. A key moment is a human-versus-machine contest in Go, a Chinese game of strategy believed to be the oldest board game still being played, where the rules and size of the board allow for longer, more fluid play.

When one of the best Go players in the world played a five-game tournament against the computer program AlphaGo, Du Sautoy watched with “a sense of existential anxiety.” He had often compared Go to mathematics and felt that if the computer won, it would be encroaching on his own intellectual and creative home turf. AlphaGo had learned from centuries of human play and also had the benefit of having played millions of games against itself, refining its code to develop strategies for conventional moves as well as shockingly new ones. One referee said, of a particularly surprising gambit by the computer, “It’s not a human move.”

AlphaGo won the match three games to zero, but, over all, “The Creativity Code” argues reassuringly that true creativity belongs to humanity. Du Sautoy affirms this even in the area of mathematics: “How will an algorithm know what mathematics will cause that exciting rush of adrenaline that shakes you awake and spurs you on?” A computer may best any human at calculation, but it lacks that snippet of “human code” that lets us know when an idea is not just new but meaningful.

312 pp. Belknap/Harvard University. $30.