Creative Integration: A Decidable Criterion of Creativity
Quick Answer
This paper establishes a decidable criterion for creative integration (CI) based on compression, asserting that a genuine integration reduces description length of a conflict.
Quick Take
This paper establishes a decidable criterion for creative integration (CI) based on compression, asserting that a genuine integration reduces description length of a conflict. The authors validate this criterion through a multi-domain corpus and four rigorous tests, emphasizing that true creativity compresses conflicts rather than merely presenting novelty.
Key Points
- Creative integration is defined as reducing description length of conflicts.
- The criterion is validated through independent computational checks and out-of-sample predictions.
- Four binary gates are used to make the judgment decidable.
- The study provides a taxonomy to reject pseudo-integrations.
- The authors propose a conjecture on the nature of all creativity.
Paper Resources
Article Content
From source RSS / original summaryarXiv:2606. 13977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: "Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration -- one that makes the world cheaper to describe -- from a tidy re-description.
Building on the lineage that treats creativity and intelligence as compression, we give such a criterion for creative integration (CI): the resolution of a real conflict between A and B is CI if and only if, under a fixed description language, the description length strictly shrinks (C = L_pre/L_post > 1), with the reduction located in the conflict itself.
We make the judgment decidable through four binary, conjunctive gates, and we fix its extension through a taxonomy of pseudo-integration that names and rejects the look-alikes. We back the criterion with a curated, multi-domain corpus and -- crucially -- validate it not by human inter-rater agreement but by four falsifiable tests it could fail: an independent computational check, discrimination against hard negatives, out-of-sample prediction, and description-language robustness; all pass with margin.
The contribution is not "creativity is compression" but its decidability, discrimination, and corpus: on this account, what makes a move genuinely creative -- rather than merely novel -- is that it compresses a conflict, with novelty and value as downstream symptoms; whether all creativity is so constituted we state as an explicit conjecture. We claim only the sign of C-1; we judge, not generate. The result is a citable primitive for a broader program.
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