Umbra Professor and Students Submit Psychology Paper for Milan Symposium
Prof. John L. Dennis, along with several students of the INIT 350 Academic Internship & Seminar, Psychology, submitted an invited conference submission for a symposium “Inside the Creative Mind” organized by Prof. Alessandro Antonietti (Università del Sacro Cuore Milano) at the annual meeting for the Italian Association for Cognitive Science held at The University of Milan, December 1-2. The submission was on on how Genetic Algorithms can be useful for modeling human creativity. The symposium will include presentations by Mathematicians, Philosophers, and Linguists as well as Psychologists.
Students (using Google Documents) collaborated simultaneously on the article submission, which discusses how Genetic Algorithms, despite following procedures that are not “intelligent,” are able to find solutions that can be recognized as intelligent. The article argues that several principles of Genetic Algorithms – for example, the memorization, storage and retrieval of information as well as the combination and recombination of simple elements within a mechanical procedure of trial and error – can be used to formulate the foundation of a cumulative creative process.