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Creative computing covers the interdisciplinary area at the cross-over of the creative arts and computing. Issues of creativity include knowledge discovery. Computers have also had a reflective impact in popularizing and disseminating mathematical insights that would be other-wise limited to a small community of scholars. For instance, although Poincare and Hadamard almost 100 years before had a truly modern considerate of chaos and sensitive dependence on initial conditions, it wasn’t until the prevalent availability of computers permitted easy numerical simulations that these ideas led to a wholesale shift in our view of dynamical systems, deterministic chaos, and the loss of predictability. It goes without saying that computers are invaluable tools in carrying out research. Computers have always been important in helping to formulate hypotheses and check theoretical calculations—even when a computer was a person. There is a general harmony that computers can transform and inspire human creativity in considerably different ways than any other artificial or human made device. The range of possibilities is obvious in this volume, which contains many exciting efforts describing the computer’s use in developing art practices, music composition and performance.

This Books brings a broad range of views on computers and creativity. It proposes a number of questions that we think are important for future research in relation to computers and creativity. It shows how computers can enhance human creativity; whether computer art can ever be properly valued; what computing can tell us about creativity; and how creativity and computing can be brought together in learning. The contributed chapters are written by leading researchers, theorists and artists working in artificial intelligence, generative art, creative computing, and cybernetics, the book examines the relationship between computation and creativity from both analytic and practical perspectives. The book will appeal to students, researchers in artificial intelligence practicing artists and musicians, and any reader generally interested in understanding how computers can impact upon creativity.