On Creativity

I was talking to a friend recently about creativity. (years and years ago). Because it was so long ago, I don’t recall the argument exactly. I mostly remember that my friend’s position was that chess is not a creative pursuit. (And that we didn’t finish the conversation because we were both annoyed at a couple walking very closely behind us but not passing us. (probably in awe at our fascinating conversation)). This disappointed but did not surprise me. My friend is a pen-and-ink (and now paint) artist, writer, and musician. All famously more creative pursuits than chess. I wasn’t trying to argue that chess was as creative as those pursuits, just that it required some. But she seemed unconvinced, and the conversation was cut short. Which is why I’m still thinking about this.

I’m worried it would be boring to try to convince a general audience that chess takes creativity. My intuition says that most people would be receptive to the idea (and also not really care). At the same time, it feels unusually bold even for me to try to comprehensively define Creativity. The structure I’ve decided on is to think of every argument my friend could have made and why they would be wrong. So just what I’ve been doing the past couple years.

If it’s not obvious, this defense of chess’s reputation is neither altruistic nor unbiased. I think of myself as a creative player (and sometimes my opponents agree), and that’s only meaningful if chess is a creative pursuit.

Constraints and Choices

One of my friend’s problems with chess is that it’s limited to a finite board and pieces and finite (albeit unimaginably large) possible games whereas the possible books or paintings are relatively limitless. No disagreements there. (In fact, the notation for all possible chess games is a subset of works on the shelves at the Library of Babel).

And constraints do seem to play an important role in making room for creativity. The game of War doesn’t allow for any creativity at all because it’s deterministic. If you’re not playing against a card sharp, the winner is decided at the time the deck is shuffled and dealt. The game is so constrained that there’s no room for creativity. A similar argument is true for tic-tac-toe. Even though you do have some choices, it’s a solved game. The choices are between playing like everyone else and losing.

Suddenly chess’s constraints don’t look so constraining. Sure there are plenty of positions with less relative freedom. For instance, you often have to recapture right away if your opponent takes a piece. But in most positions in a given game, there will be multiple moves that are on a par in terms of quality. Some will be obvious. Some might be harder to see. Some only make sense in the context of a larger plan. Within the constraints of chess, there’s a lot of room to play aggressively or defensively, safely or risky

From the opposite direction, all art subjects itself to constraints, and yet no one looks at a painting and says, “Oh you drew a picture?! That’s been done before.” They don’t say that pen-and-ink is “less creative” than oil because there are fewer degrees of freedom. If anything, the right constraints breed creativity. Pen-and-ink artists have to figure out how to represent texture and shading in ways that painters don’t.

The Aim of Chess is to Win

This is how I would argue against myself. But I happen to know it’s not my friend’s position because she also argued that racquetball is a creative pursuit. Still I think it’s worth addressing. The primary goal in chess isn’t Creating something, it’s winning the game. You’d imagine that the way to do that would be to study and practice calculation to be able to find the best move in any position and the person who did that the best would win. That wouldn’t constitute creativity because everyone would be trying to do the same thing to varying degrees of success.

If this were the case, I think we’d see more convergence towards similar types of games at the highest levels. In practice we see the opposite (usually). For instance, top players are the ones developing opening theory while most of us only study it. Better chess players are less bound by the simple heuristics that cause amateurs to pick the same sorts of uncreative moves. I think it’s similar to art in that way. Creativity in art comes from some original observation, understanding, and representation of the world. Creativity in chess is the same only for a much smaller, squarier world.

Chess is less conducive to creativity

I’ve been purposely cagey about defining “creative pursuit” because I don’t really know what it means. Maybe you can do anything creatively, but creative pursuits are those things which are especially conducive to being creative. The arts would fall under this category because it’s hard to do them uncreatively while the sciences wouldn’t. Although it’s possible to do them creatively, they don’t lend themselves to it.

In this, I actually think chess is more similar to art than it is different. When you’re learning either, you’re too consumed by attaining some technical skill to worry about creativity (or possibly even to have a sense of what would be original and what is played out). Then you begin copying artists or players you like. Then you develop your own sense for creativity in the field.

I was reminded of this topic by this review on the inception of the term “creativity”. I actually don’t mind the usage. The tension is that a lot of work greatly benefits from creativity and yet also has to conceive of workers as replaceable in order to function. My old CEO referred to the corporate campus as her “code factory”.