"write everything twice", "we enjoy typing" or "waste everyone's time"

Making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity.

A mind follows its path of least resistance, and it's when it feels easiest that it is most likely being its most creative. Or, as Mozart used to say, things should "flow like oil"-and Mozart ought to know! Trying harder is not the name of the game; the trick is getting the right concept to begin with, so that making variations on it is like taking candy from a baby.

Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity

That way, the perceptual process is intimately linked up with the generative process: a loop is closed in which perceptions spark new potentials and experimentation with new potentials opens up the way for new perceptions.

For a machine to make simple variants of a given design, it must possess an algorithm for making that design which has explicit parameters; those parameters are then modifiable, as with the pseudo- Mondrian paintings. But the way people make variations is quite different. They look at some creation by an artist (or computer), and then they abstract from it some quality that they observe in the creation itself (not in some algorithm behind it). This newly abstracted quality may never have been thought of explicitly by the artist (or programmer or computer), yet it is there for the seeing by an acute observer. This perceptual act gets you more than half the way to genuine creativity; the remainder involves treating this new quality as if it FIGURE 10-15. 1 at the Center, by David Oleson. Created in the studio of William Huff Parquet Deformations: A Subtle, Intricate Art Form 198 were an explicit knob: "twiddling" it as if it were a parameter that had all along been in the program that made the creation.

In any case, the core of the process is analogy-making, but a somewhatpeculiar variety of analogy-making, in that one isn't exactly sure of theidentityor theedgesof the structures between which analogies are being made. Of coursethis is all the more true of real-world analogy-making: no true-life situationcomes with hard-and-fast boundaries; all situations blur out into a myriad othersituations and facts, and an important part of the act of analogy-making is thedetermination of where one situation ends and others start.

Furthermore, lines in computerprograms do not come labeled "I matter -leave me alone!" and ''I'm slippable- tamper with me asyou please!" How to represent the "untouchable essence"or the "core" of an idea, when the idea can be seen from unbelievably manydifferent perspectives?

To be able togeneralizea sequence - to think of it as a theme on which tomake variations - one has to have a crystal-clear sense ofwhat it is about.BythisI mean that one has to understand what is central and must therefore bepreserved in a variation, as opposed to what is peripheral and therefore "slip-pable". And since variations can be made from endlessly many different per-spectives, one needs to be able to see slippability lurking in all sorts of hiddenspots (this idea is explored in depth in Chapter 12 of Hofstadter, 1985).

the centrality of the making of analogies and variations on a themeinhigh-level cognition;

The act of composing a rich and diverse set of variations on a theme, suchas we have just been through, is a creative and intellectually stimulating game