[nilirl]

I wouldn't jump to call it a trick, but I agree, the author sacrificed too much clarity in a try for efficiency.

The author set up an interesting analogy but failed to explore where it breaks down or how all the relationships work in the model.

My inference about the author's meaning was such: In a sharp peak, searching for useful moves is harder because you have fewer acceptable options as you approach the peak.

[davrosthedalek]

Fewer absolute or relative? If you scale down your search space... This only makes some kind of sense if your step size is fixed. While I agree with another poster that a reduction of a creative process to gradient descent is not wise, the article also misses the point what makes such a gradient descent hard -- it's not sharp peaks, it's the flat area around them -- and the presence of local minima.

[nilirl]

I see your point. I'd meant relatively fewer progressive options compared to an absolute and unchanging number of total options.

But that's not what the author's analogy would imply.

Still, I think you're saying the author is deducing the creative process as a kind of gradient descent, whereas my reading was the author was trying to abductively explore an analogy.

[davrosthedalek]

True, but my point is that not only does the analogy not work, the author also doesn't understand the thing he makes the analogy with, or at least explores the thought so shoddily that it makes no sense.

It's somewhat like saying cars are faster than motorbikes because they have more wheels-- it's like with horses and humans, horses have four legs and because of that are faster than humans with two legs. It's wrong on both sides of the analogy.