Creativity is a fascinating quality of our minds. It is an essential ingredient for doing innovation, creating beauty or solving everyday problems. ”Little-C” creativity is particularly indispensable in everyday cognitive functioning, yet research still hasn’t come up with a full account of the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underpinning it. Since it is multi-faceted and is, by definition, a very high- level process, it is a challenge to create a model which encompasses all stages of the creative process and unifies all its low-level mechanisms.
In this work we focus on studying creative thinking under the associative theory of creativity. We do so by using a simple dynamical model for undirected search. We evaluate it on a widely-used test for creativity. We want to see whether a simple local search process on a network can lead to finding the solution of a multiply-constrained problem. By using an open-ended process on a closed-solution task we attempt to achieve a unification of the distinct aspects of creative ability.
