This is the second edition of The Creative Mind (hereafter TCM), which was originally published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1990. This edition has a new 10-page introduction that outlines Boden’s theory of creativity and a 17-page epilogue that describes some recent computational models of creativity. The main text remains the same except for some minor clarificatory changes and the inclusion, in Chapter 7, of some material on Douglas Hofstadter’s COPYCAT program.

The programs described in the epilogue include JAPE, which generates low-key puns such as ‘‘What do you call a depressed train?A low-comotive’’, and ‘‘What do you call a strange market? A bizarre bazaar’’ (p. 305). Boden tells us about ‘Letter Spirit’, which is the latest and most ambitious project to come out of the Hofstadter/FARG stable at Indiana University, Bloomington. ‘Letter Spirit’ designs new fonts in the lower-case Roman alphabet. Boden says that it is a connectionist system. Hofstadter stresses that it is not a connectionist system. His complaint about connectionist systems is that once you have trained them up the processing whooshes through all in one go, without any of the compromise and give-and-take that characterises human creativity. It is true that ‘Letter Spirit’ has a low-level, stochastic architecture, like a connectionist system, but unlike a connectionist system it is highly modular. The decision-making is kicked around between its modules and the creative product emerges out of this. (Ideally, it emerges out of a resolution of tension between conflicting modules.)