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Asc2Com (MorganSoft) | 1990-12-09 | 26.1 KB | 363 lines

------------------------------------------ This is the fifth of nine chapters of THINK THUNDER! AND UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY Copyright (c) 1989 by Thomas A. Easton ------------------------------------------ CHAPTER 5: COMPUTER-AIDED BRAINSTORMING I have told you what brainstorming is. I have told you how it works. I have asked you to try the process. And perhaps it has worked for you. Beautiful! You may now stop reading. This book has nothing more to offer you, for you already know how to be creative. You say it didn't work? You didn't need it in the first place, for you already had a popcorn mind? Then reread that last paragraph. Or did you freeze? Faced with that blank piece of paper, did your mind wipe itself clean of every thought? Did you feel naked before me, this book, your friends, your coworkers? Did you want to scream? Then relax. This book is for you. If your mind just won't pop, we'll show you how to crank up a machine to do the job for you, and then how to use what the machine produces. That is, we will finally get to what we have been promising throughout the last three chapters: computer-aided brainstorming. BRAINSTORMING MACHINES But first, let us ask just what a brainstorming machine must have and be able to do. The answer is not that the machine must be fully creative, for brainstorming is not a recipe for full creativity even in purely human hands. That is, the machine need not write poems or short stories or term papers. It need not make inventions or discoveries. The essence of brainstorming is popping--generating new combinations of words, ideas, and images, without regard for whether the combinations make any sense at all--and this is what we want the machine to do. We want it to generate the essential raw material of the creative process, that abundant mixture of gold and garbage through which the critical mind later sorts. Clearly, the more words, ideas, and images the brainstormer has, the greater the number of combinations, the more raw material, he, she, or it can produce. That is, before they can ever begin to pop, people need well stocked minds, a supply of words, facts, images, concepts, and the like that they can mix together in order to come up with new ideas. The most creative people seem to have the best stocked minds, through wide reading, extensive education, or broad experience. A brainstorming machine also needs a "knowledge base," an inventory of words, ideas, and images that it can use to generate the combinations. And, like creative people, it must be able to generate those combinations freely, without restraint. The nonsense filter, the critical mind, must not come into play until AFTER the popcorn mind has generated something to run through the filter. Activating such a filter too soon inhibits full creativity. The machine need not be a computer, at least not in the electronic sense, and it need not be complex. In fact, it can be very simple: Take a deck of ordinary playing cards. Write on each card a different word; this gives you the necessary "knowledge base," though of only 52 words. Now shuffle the deck, and deal a five-card hand. Arrange the words to form a sentence, adding prepositions, conjunctions, and other words as necessary. Or write a dozen nouns in a column down the lefthand side of a sheet of paper. Put another dozen nouns on the righthand side of the sheet. Put a dozen verbs down the middle. Now take two dice and roll them, once to pick a noun from the lefthand column, once for a verb, and once for a noun from the righthand column. Add whatever you need to turn your three words into a sentence. Or write fifty or so nouns on slips of paper, put the slips in a hat or jar, and stir them vigorously. Do the same for verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Now draw one word from each of your hats or jars and make a sentence. A machine is simply an arrangement of items that does something for you. In each of these cases, you have created a simple brainstorming machine. All three will generate new combinations of the words you provided. All three will stand in quite effectively for the popcorn mind you do not have--the deck of cards can give you over 300,000,000 five-word combinations, and many, many more if you are willing to change the 52-word vocabulary once in awhile. All three of these processes work by using randomness--the draw of a card or a slip of paper, or the roll of dice--to guarantee the originality of the resulting combinations. That is, the matching of words has no built-in selectiveness. The word "cat" is just as likely to show up with "iceberg" as it is with "mouse" (as long as those three words are in the brainstorming machine's vocabulary). In this respect, they all work in much the same way as the popcorn mind, for that aspect of the creative mind does seem to operate randomly--often there is indeed no apparent rhyme or reason to the way it combines words, ideas, and images. They also resemble the popcorn mind in that most of the sentences they produce are garbage; randomness guarantees only novelty, not sense. Popcorn minds and brainstorming machines all require the critical mind if they are to contribute anything meaningful to your enterprises. The critical mind is what discards the garbage. Applied to the output of a brainstorming machine--a deck of cards, lists on a sheet of paper, hats full of paper slips, or a computer program--it creates the impression of creativity by throwing away everything except the good stuff. The process is exactly the same as that of the sculptor who, confronted by a block of marble, removes everything that does not look like the sculpture he has in mind. Writers call this process editing. These processes also resemble the popcorn mind in that, despite their randomness, they can be focused on a particular topic. The method is simple: All you need do is load the machine with words that relate to the topic--any topic!--and all the resulting sentences must have something to do with that topic. A BRAINSTORMING COMPUTER Unfortunately, all of the above processes are cumbersome. They work, but they take time to set up, and more time to use. We would be much happier if we had a brainstorming machine that worked at the press of a button, that used a larger vocabulary, and that didn't need so much help to turn its product into sentences. That is, we would rather have a brainstorming computer. What should such a machine be like? Consider--it must have lists of words, perhaps separate lists for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The lists must be changeable, for only by giving the machine a suitable vocabulary can one hope to brainstorm about any specific topic. The machine must be able to choose words from the lists, not by shuffling and dealing cards or rolling dice but by the kindred electronic process of generating random numbers. (The program numbers the words in a list from 1 to N, where N is the number of words in the list. It then picks a number, at random, between 1 and N in order to specify one of the N words.) And finally, it must be able to use the words it picks to build sentences. I first began to think along these lines when my daughter, then eight years old, brought home from the library William Steig's book, C D C, a collection of cartoons with strange captions. One drawing pictured a group of African pygmies; behind them lay scattered tusks and bare bones. The caption was: "V F E-10 D L-F-N." My daughter wanted more. So did I. I therefore made a list of all the letters and numbers that sounded vaguely like words or syllables and programmed my computer to pick, using random numbers, items from the list; combine them into strings; and print them out. Unfortunately, none of the results resembled sentences even remotely. I replaced the list of letters and numbers with lists of words, one each for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. I had the machine pick words at random from the lists and insert them into blank spots in generic sentences such as: "Once upon a time, a <ADJECTIVE> <NOUN> <VERB>ed a <ADJECTIVE> <NOUN>." I gave this program several different such sentences, each one with a different structure, and had it choose one to use, at random. This ensured some variety in the results, and those results proved highly entertaining, as you might expect considering the resemblance of what I was doing to that classic party game, Mad-Libs (see Exhibit 2). ----------------------- EXHIBIT 2: A randomly generated fairy tale. Once upon a time, a blank beer found a resilient student. We then incompetently held a buzzing ship. At last, an arched corn on the cob fragrantly panted after a truck. Who quickly, fragrantly overheard a rhinoceros? When the airlock satisfyingly slopped it all on the hot roses, he licked its forested egg. Finally, an intelligent supper yearned for an actively hot back. ----------------------- Then I recast the generic sentences to make them sound like predictions of the future, added lists of names, places, disasters, and technical developments, and gave the program the ability to generate dates and answer questions. And I had a computer psychic that could make utterances such as the one in Exhibit 3. ----------------------- EXHIBIT 3: A randomly generated prediction for the future. Source: T. A. Easton, "Psychics, computers, and psychic computers," THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, vol. 11 (No. 4), Summer 1987, pp. 383-388. Nose jobs for elephants will first be possible on January 6, 2002, but it immediately will incinerate a tsunami for Miss Manners. ----------------------- Finally, I adapted the techniques I was playing with to produce the computer program around which this book is built. It uses lists of up to 200 nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs supplied by you, the user, to generate novel, unexpected word combinations, both as random sentences and as phrases or images. It can function completely automatically or it can interact with the user. And it does indeed work. It generates the new combinations it is designed to generate, and it generates them endlessly, limited only by the nature of the computer's random number generator (which is not really quite random), by the vocabulary you give the program, and by the structure of the six available generic sentences into which the program plugs the words it chooses. Does the program make the computer truly creative? Of course not. It mimicks only the first stage--the popcorn mind--of creativity. It does nothing remotely resembling the activities of the critical mind. As in the case of spontaneous, unaided brainstorming, that remains for the human being--you. YOU must identify and discard the garbage and keep or transform the rest if you wish to come up with any truly good new ideas. However, since the computer relieves you of the need to pop, it is a great help. This is why we call the process "computer-aided brainstorming." AUTOMATIC BRAINSTORMING Even without your critical mind, the program can give you material that is close to what you seek. Consider: You wish to brainstorm about camping trips, perhaps in order to devise an original advertising campaign for tents. You therefore load the brainstorming computer program's word lists with words related to camping, such as: CAMP, SHED, TENT, CLOUD, MOON, REPELLENT, WIND, HEAT, BOAT, CAVERN, INJURY, and TREE, among many others. You then set the computer to brainstorming in its automatic mode (see Chapter 1 for details), and you get the paragraph shown in Exhibit 4. ----------------------- EXHIBIT 4: Sample, automatic brainstorming. We land the tension of a kingly cloth from a logical camp. As expected, a royal mist helpfully fail a friend. As expected, a galactic plate subtly describe a wrench. She carefully anxiously debate a camp. A rich friend report the loyally elegant camp. In conclusion, a lonely tree help a developmentally punky incense. ----------------------- Do you think that doesn't make much sense? It doesn't have to. This is brainstorming, and your task now is to turn your critical mind loose, spot the buried gold, and MAKE the nonsense make sense. Throw away whatever sentences make no sense whatsoever. With the rest, look at them as if they were a psychologist's Rohrschach ink-blots: Let them draw hidden thoughts from the depths of your subconscious. Or see them as like the flames in a fireplace: Let them prompt you to new thoughts, new images, new ideas. What can you see in the above paragraph? Might a "kingly cloth" refer to a luxurious tent? Might that galactic plate describing a wrench be a large flying saucer seeking help with repairs? Might "tree" and "incense" refer to camping in a cedar forest? Now, about that advertising campaign.... The program has a second automatic mode, too. This one generates images, not sentences, by picking random adjective-noun, adverb-verb, and adverb-verb- noun combinations, and it can give you such characters for your camping ad as "purple wenches." And like the first mode, it is limited by the nature of the computer's random number generator and by the vocabulary you load into the program's word lists. It is not limited by the available sentence structures because it does not deliver sentences. In both automatic modes, the program seems to work best when you do not try to make all its vocabulary deal with a single topic. Add just ten or twenty words to each list every time you change topics. Then the lists will contain small vocabularies dealing with several topics, and the brainstorms will combine ideas from many--and often very different--topics, just as does the human popcorn mind. INTERACTIVE BRAINSTORMING You may shy away from fully automatic, fully random brainstorming. Not everyone is comfortable with nonsense. They are reality-bound, and everything has to make at least a little sense, and to do so on the surface, immediately. They are not prepared to find sense by interpreting or questioning or reacting to nonsense, which automatic, random brainstorming does require. This orientation clearly has to interfere with creativity, for it limits the freedom of the popcorn mind by telling it not to bother with anything that fails to make immediate sense. However, it does not make our brainstorming computer useless. The program has an interactive mode that allows a reality-bound user to escape much--but not all--of the nonsense of randomness. This part of the program first asks you for a topic. That is, you say what you want to brainstorm about. Later, when the program generates sentences, each sentence will contain your topic word or phrase, thus guaranteeing some link to your main concern. Once you have named your topic, the program offers you a list of six nouns. It calls these nouns "lightning rods" in keeping with the "brainstorm" metaphor, and because the phrase fits what will soon happen. You must pick one of these "lightning rods," because it seems either to match your topic or to contrast with it. The sentence the program later generates will contain both this noun and your topic. Once you have chosen the lightning rod, the program offers you a list of six verbs, calling them "lightning bolts." Pick one, for match or contrast, and the program will generate a sentence, using a generic, fill-in-the-blank sentence chosen randomly from three available. In this sentence, the verb will link your topic (think of the topic as a cloud of uncertainty from which lightning must explode in order to create the brainstorm) and your chosen lightning-rod noun as if it truly were a lightning bolt. The brainstorm will be complete, as illustrated in Exhibit 5. ----------------------- EXHIBIT 5: An interactive brainstorm. TOPIC: POTATO CHIPS LIGHTNING RODS (nouns): path tension HOME colony heat floor LIGHTNING BOLTS (verbs): explode repair defy fail CELEBRATE write BRAINSTORM: A HOME CELEBRATE the oddly spirited POTATO CHIPS. ----------------------- And that brainstorm will NOT be totally random nonsense. In fact, it often makes a great deal of sense, largely because you picked three of the major words in the sentence. The random component is much less than in the fully automatic brainstorm, though it remains adequate to produce the novel combinations of words, images, and ideas that are the point of brainstorming. Some of the novelty enters the process when you are forced to choose from just six nouns and six verbs, all randomly picked, to go with your topic. More comes in when the program fleshes out the brainstorm sentences. The crucial point about this way of using the brainstorming computer program is that YOU remain in control. The process is still computer-aided brainstorming, for the computer program adds a distinct component of novelty, or randomness, to your choice of topic, lightning rod, and lightning bolt. It therefore helps you see beyond the obvious, for though you specify major components of the brainstorm, it puts those components in novel relationships to each other and adds other components. Again, the program relieves you of the need to pop. And, of course, if you don't like the result, you can try again. Once the brainstorm is complete, the program offers you several options. You can save the brainstorm for later reference, you can stay with the same topic but choose a new lightning rod and lightning bolt, or you can start over with a new topic. That is, you can repeat the interactive process until you come up with a brainstorm that your critical mind recognizes as gold, not garbage. What you do with it then is up to you. SUBCONSCIOUS CREATIVITY REVEALED What is going on here? In both the interactive and the noninteractive brainstorms, the computer program is providing outside stimuli that force your subconscious to reveal itself. In the interactive process, your choices of lightning rod and lightning bolt reflect whatever is going on in the subconscious depths of your mind. In the noninteractive process, the subconscious reveals itself when you decide that certain sentences--but not others--are significant. The wholly human brainstormer can say no more, for what pops to the surface of his or her mind--or which popped-up notion he or she sees as worth developing further--is precisely the result of the same subconscious processes. And those subconscious thought processes are creative. They are not reined in by fear of ridicule or failure or success. They are full of novel ideas (consider the nature of your dreams, which tap the subconscious directly). And most of us suppress them in favor of reality. If we wish to tap them as freely as creative artists, who are famous for the freedom of their access to their subconsciouses, we need some kind of help. That help is now in your hands. It is the THUNDER THOUGHT computer-aided brainstorming system. SUMMARY Because the essence of brainstorming is generating new combinations of words, ideas, and images, many systems can serve as "brainstorming machines." These systems can be as simple as a deck of cards on each card of which is written a different word. They can be as complicated as a computer program. All must have some initial stock of words, ideas, and/or images to recombine. As we might expect, knowing that more creative people tend to be more widely read or educated, the larger the initial stock, the better. Brainstorming systems or machines all use lists of words as their necessary raw material and pick the words by some random process. The computer program around which this book is built uses four lists, of up to 200 words each, of nouns, verbs, adjective, and adverbs. It picks words from the lists by generating random numbers. It then plugs the picked words into blanks in predefined sentence "frameworks," much as in the party game of Mad-Libs. The resulting filled-in sentences are the program's "brainstorms." The computer program is not, of course, creative in the full sense of the term, for its output is necessarily dominated by garbage. On the other hand, the creative mind also generates a lot of garbage. In both cases, the critical mind is crucial to the creative process, for it must identify and discard the garbage and, if necessary, transform what it keeps in order to find or create good, new ideas. The computer program requires that you first give it a vocabulary with which to work. Once you have done so, you can have the program operate fully automatically, generating full sentences or adjective-noun, adverb-verb, and adverb-verb-noun combinations. You can also give the program a topic and choose from lists of six nouns (lightning rods) and verbs (lightning bolts); the program then generates sentences in which your choices have severely restricted the amount of randomness, or nonsense. In either mode, the program relieves you of the need to pop, or to generate novel combinations of words, ideas, and images yourself. It taps your subconscious creativity indirectly, by asking your subconscious not to create but to choose ideas that mesh with its own creations or that inspire it to see sense where your conscious mind is blind. ------------------------------------------------------------- Press <ESC> to exit this chapter and BROWSE the next chapter. ------------------------------------------------------------- Complete book and software available from R.K. West Consulting P.O. Box 8059, Mission Hills, CA 91346.