[ image courtesy of Imagination Engines Inc. ]

Stephen Thaler founded a company named Imagination Engines Inc. to explore the possibilities of the Creativity Machine, a "thinking" machine based on artificial neural networks. If the machine works the way Thaler describes it, it's indeed a beautiful, ingenious idea.

Here's a documentary on the Creativity Machine:

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6464697696665901632]

From Imagination Engines Inc's web page::

An artificial neural network that has been trained on some body of knowledge and then perturbed in a specially prescribed way tends to activate into concepts and/or strategies (e.g., new ideas) derived from that original body of knowledge. These transiently perturbed networks are called 'imagination engines' or 'imagitrons'. If another computational agent, such as a traditional rule-based algorithm or, even better, another trained neural network is allowed to filter for the very best of these emerging ideas, we arrive at an extremely valuable neural architecture, the patented Creativity Machine. Optional feedback connections between this latter computational agent and the imagination engine assure swift convergence toward useful ideas or strategies.

This new Artificial Intelligence (AI) paradigm is vastly more powerful than genetic algorithms (GA), efficiently generating new concepts on mere desktop computers rather than on the computational clusters required of GAs.

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More info on the Creativity Machine:

• Experimental AI Powers Robot Army (Sept. 2006)

• Stephen Thaler's Computer Creativity Machine Simulates the Human Brain (Jan. 2004)

• Interview with Dr. Stephen Thaler (Feb. 2002)

• Autonomous Ultrahard Materials Discovery via Spreadsheet-Implemented Neural Network Cascades (April 1997)

• The creativity machine (Jan. 1996)