For a long time, I have been thinking about the process of creating things, and it seems to me that at least in my experience there is no real difference between “design”, “art”, “innovation”, “invention”, or really any other process of creating something new. Even the phase of informal engineering known as “brainstorming” is in my mind the same as all of these. This common process is iterative (you repeat, revise, and rethink to gain a better result) and generative (you aim to gain a better result by generating something new).

Now I would say that “generative” is not accurate enough because in order to have a good result in any of these creative processes (whether art, design, or the invention of some innovative contraption or solution to a challenge) you often do not aim to generate something that is similar to something done before. Often the best solutions are unique and have not been explored before. These potential solutions are obviously valuable then, because of their potential to be better than anything explored before. However, new and innovative solutions are not often created by simply randomly trying things and avoiding unsuccessful previous attempts. When deciding what should be attempted, there is some kind of guidance which favors solutions which are more likely to succeed.

I don’t know how our brains generate these innovative solutions, but to me the guidance involved seems to be rooted in intuition. When thinking of a solution to some challenging problem, or some way to express an idea (artistic, technical, etc.) that achieves the objective of being “good”, often an innovative solution just seems to pop into the mind. (Often after a really long time.) At least, this is how it seems for me. There is no real definitive process for coming up with a solution, but somehow the solution is concocted through a sort of experience-guided intuition where our past knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, for certain problems and certain situations, guides us to a half-decent solution to the challenge at hand before we have even attempted to implement anything. (Of course, once we have an initial idea, it is then refined as we implement it and try to make it better through reinforcement. That part is the iterative element I mentioned above.) If this intuition doesn’t manage to come up with a good solution on the first try, at least the initial solution was our best attempt possible at that time since it would have taken into account all of our previous experiences in attempting similar things.

#machine-learning #neural-networks #artificial-intelligence #computer-science #technology #deep learning