I think that it is easiest (and therefore best ;) to define creativity by what we can observe about it, without any internal knowledge about it. So basically "

I think that it is easiest (and therefore best ;) to define creativity by what we can observe about it, without any internal knowledge about it. So basically "creativity" is some sort of black-box that generates novel outcomes (for a broad sense of outcomes). On the face of it, I think that for this definition of creativity, I think you could do by simply logically exploring problem spaces that have not been explored before, or by exploring branches in problem spaces that have not been explored before. Maybe throw in a source of randomness when deciding what to explore, to explore possibilities that may not otherwise make sense but could nevertheless lead to interesting outcomes. (The equivalent of a chemist randomly fucking around in his backyard shed). Some of my friends and I practice a sort of very limited mechanical creativity in the form of a drinking game. We invent new "startup ideas" by ad libbing into the phrase "The ____ of ____", where both blanks are existing companies. We then explore that idea and speculate on what such a company would actually entail. "The Twitter of Githubs", maybe that's a company build around the idea of sharing code snippets, like gists? Not a very interesting idea, but I'm sober at the moment. ;)