Stephen Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc., has developed a computer program called a Creativity Machine.

] What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in
] a box," said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at
] General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.
]
] "His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous
] Generation of Useful Information," the official name of
] the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent
] was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent
] Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about
] that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number
] One!"
]
] Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of
] what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking
] machine.

In a piece like this it's hard to separate the hype from the true advancements. The concept presented makes a certain kind of intuitive sense -- but maybe that's because it resonates with ideas and results presented by others.

The emergent behavior of the cockroach-like H3 robots sounds real similar to Rodney Brooks walking robots. (google on 'rodney brooks subsumption citations')

David Gelernter presented a concept of "affect linking" (The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought by David Hillel Gelernter) which had a notion of dialing the level of creativity by accepting different amounts of fuzziness in matching ideas together.

This resonance is, perhaps, an indicator that Thaler may be on to something. A stronger indicator would be experimental data the show that Thaler's algorithm scales up to machines with greater than a cockroach-level processing power.

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