Insightful artificial intelligence

In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world-champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as "creative" by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I argue that AlphaGo displays one important aspect of creative problem solving (namely mental scenario building in the form of Monte Carlo tree search), while lacking another (domain generality). This analysis has consequences for how we think about creativity in humans and AI.