A major criticism of the Turing test is that it fails to capture a core feature of human intelligence: the ability to think creatively. What is creative intelligence? Can machines or animals have it?

Marta Halina’s research project brings together a world-class team of researchers across scientific disciplines to address these questions. Each of these diverse fields shares a common trait: their subjects are capable of reputed creative acts.

Creativity is often portrayed as mysterious—an inexplicable achievement of adult human cognition. But creative intelligence plays crucial roles in developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Even so, the notion of creativity lacks solid conceptual foundations. Because of this, the possibility for fruitful exchange between these disciplines remains unrealized.

To enable such cross-disciplinary dialogue, this project will develop a multi-dimensional account of creative intelligence that fosters greater appreciation and understanding of creative intelligence in its many forms. Such an account will allow the team to identify the similarities and differences between animal and machine intelligence without relying on anthropocentric accounts of creativity to do so. The project will include collaborators across the above disciplines at the following universities:

• Cambridge (Marta Halina, Adrian Currie, Fumiya Iida, Murray Shanahan, and others)
• UC Berkeley (Alison Gopnik and Stuart Russell)
• Leipzig (Corina Logan and Dieter Lukas)
• Australia National University (Rachael Brown)

The project is based out of the History and Philosophy of Science Department (HPS) and the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at the University of Cambridge. It will build on and extend the work of the Kinds of Intelligence project led by Marta Halina.