Evaluating In Silico Creativity: An Expert Review of AI Chess Compositions

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the creativity of AI-generated chess puzzles through expert review, focusing on aesthetic appeal, novelty, and uniqueness, and discusses the implications for AI's role in creative domains.

Contribution

It introduces an AI system for generating creative chess puzzles and assesses its outputs using expert evaluations, providing insights into AI's potential in creative tasks.

Findings

Experts favored certain AI puzzles for their creativity and aesthetic qualities

The system produces puzzles with high novelty and challenge levels

Expert feedback highlights AI's potential in creative chess composition

Abstract

The rapid advancement of Generative AI has raised significant questions regarding its ability to produce creative and novel outputs. Our recent work investigates this question within the domain of chess puzzles and presents an AI system designed to generate puzzles characterized by aesthetic appeal, novelty, counter-intuitive and unique solutions. We briefly discuss our method below and refer the reader to the technical paper for more details. To assess our system's creativity, we presented a curated booklet of AI-generated puzzles to three world-renowned experts: International Master for chess compositions Amatzia Avni, Grandmaster Jonathan Levitt, and Grandmaster Matthew Sadler. All three are noted authors on chess aesthetics and the evolving role of computers in the game. They were asked to select their favorites and explain what made them appealing, considering qualities such as their creativity, level of challenge, or aesthetic design.