Substrat: judge your projects for their potential to spawn more projects
humans mix novelty with personal life history (divergent actors)
successful inventors ask where we can get from here (inventions are path-dependent)
stepping stones respect how the world works
competition should play a secondary role to creativity
ambitious objectives are complex & fuzzy
objective mindset: if gradient goes up, progress; causes convergence; works for modest pursuits
paradox: greatest achievements less likely when made objectives
1) stepping stones to ambitious objectives often strange (can't guide itself, e.g. evolutionary intelligence)
2) deception (score increase leads to dead-end, e.g. pull in Chinese finger trap)
British tried to exterminate snakes in India by paying for dead snakes -> people started breeding
non-objective search (e.g. evolution, innovation): unknown search space requires not objectives but constraint
(e.g. survival, reproduction); discovery as stepping stone to discoveries;
examples: Nintendo founded in 1889, didn't develop games for ~100 ys
novelty search: shortcut to interestingness; don't judge progress to goal, but liberation from outdated;
finds more novelty (stepping stone finder); orders from simple to complex (not bad-good because unknown;
simple stepping stones must come before complex); world provides constraints (knowledge accumulator)
example: biped robot looking for novelty learned to walk faster than with objective
education idea: give up standardised tests; instead, have peer reviewed exam portfolios
evolution doesn't head anywhere but everywhere that passes minimal criteria of survival & reproduction
drift: slightly-broken copying machine leads to appearance of intelligent design
exaptation: evolved feature useful in different context (e.g. feathers 1st in dinosaurs to regulate temperature;
bone precursor stored minerals)
abstraction: capture essential features of underlying process, discard unimportant details
(e.g. checkerboard is 8x8 grid of alternating two-colored squares)
possible criteria beyond performance & guarantees: inspiration, elegance, potential to provoke further creativity,
thought-provoking construction, challenge to status quo, novelty, analogy to nature, beauty,
simplicity, imagination