[dotsam]

> It is trivial to prove otherwise - AlphaZero move 37. After 4,000 years of gameplay (yes, it is that old!) we still didn't get this level of insight in its strategy.

Are you saying that AlphaZero contains knowledge that we can't understand, even in principle? It is somehow beyond science, beyond all explanation?

> Why is search a better concept that creativity?

Search suggests a fixed set of options, whereas what is crucial is creating new ones.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

A very accomplished older professor once told me in grad school that “research” was a process of first intuiting patterns, and then “searching” for further examples of said pattern, and then “re-searching” until you had statistical confirmation.

I very much agree.

[dotsam]

You don't keep searching until a point of "statistical confirmation". This implies you have arrived at an infallible truth. Instead you look for ways you could be wrong, and try to correct any errors you find.

For instance, if you guess 'all swans are white', you don't ever get "statistical confirmation" that your guess was right. When you eventually see a black swan, you find out you were wrong. Then it's time to come up with a new theory.

[skybrian]

There are very large search spaces. Consider the space of all text documents (Borge's Library of Babel), which includes all research papers and all novels. Also, the space of all mathematical theorems, the space of all images, all videos, all songs, whatever evolution searches over.

These cover many creative activities.

But it's true that some search spaces are less well-defined.