Transformational Creativity in Science: A Graphical Theory
Artificial Intelligence
2025-05-22 v2
Abstract
Creative processes are typically divided into three types: combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational. Here, we provide a graphical theory of transformational scientific creativity, synthesizing Boden's insight that transformational creativity arises from changes in the "enabling constraints" of a conceptual space and Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions as resulting from paradigm shifts. We prove that modifications made to axioms of our graphical model have the most transformative potential and then illustrate how several historical instances of transformational creativity can be captured by our framework.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.18687,
title = {Transformational Creativity in Science: A Graphical Theory},
author = {Samuel Schapiro and Jonah Black and Lav R. Varshney},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18687},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted at ICCC 2025