Muzak, not Mozart

What is creativity? Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and Oxford professor for the public understanding of science, offers this pert definition in his introduction: ‘Creativity is the drive to come up with something that is new and surprising and that has value.’ This, he argues, is possible in mathematics (he himself invented a new kind of symmetrical object) as well as the arts in general, or what he describes as ‘the outpourings of what I call the human code’. The question he sets himself in this book is: can Artificial Intelligence do as well, or even better?

Du Sautoy’s use of the phrase ‘the human code’ for the software that is allegedly running in our heads makes the comparison more flattering to computers: after all, if one kind of code can write novels, why not another? Maybe, indeed, there is even a ‘creativity code’, as the title calls it, that, once cracked, could enable any human or machine entity to become a genius.