Creative Problem Solving

Kunkanit Yoopoo (1), Isaree Suttichurchart (2)
supervisor: Ana-Maria Olteteanu

(1) The purpose at the beginning is to investigate the way people solve the problem, and to see whether they solve them creatively. An example of the investigation is the following. Imagine you have three words, COTTAGE, SWISS, and CAKE. You need to come up with the fourth word that can be used with the provided three words. What would the next word be? The potential answer is CHEESE, since CHEESE can be used as COTTAGE CHEESE, SWISS CHEESE, and CHEESE CAKE. There are more ways that can be used, but most of them are old and did not provide normative data. With the help of computer science, we can establish and control a set of creativity and creative problem-solving tasks for the Remote Associates Test. To do such thing, the database with 17 million records are programmed in order to extract the subsets of queries with multiple answers. The data cleansing process is required to remove duplicate and incomplete values at the beginning, and the range distribution and statistics of the data set are computed afterwards. Later, the purpose of this project moves to visualisation of extracted subsets of queries since they can be used to conduct experiments with human participants and observe their skills on creative problem-solving. The online interface of this dataset will be given to Dr. Dr. Ana-Maria at the end of this internship programme.

(2) Since I have been here at Bremen Spacial Cognition Center, I have been working on two main tasks with Dr. Dr. rer. nat. Ana-Maria Olteteanu - one on the “DB/Ontology of affordances and their characteristic properties” which I have just finished on couple weeks ago, and another on the “Alternative Uses Test” which is the recent one that I am working on. For the “DB/Ontology of affordances and their characteristic properties”, it is about making a knowledge base of object affordances which includes what and how properties of objects are related to affordances. In this task, I was working about cleaning data that were given, aggregating their results, and computing for useful outcomes by using Java language. On the other hand, the “Alternative Uses Test” is focusing on providing average scores for a set of objects for the research community to measure their own results against. Similar with the previous task, I am working on the cleaning data and aggregation process, but in this task, it has a slightly higher range of sensitive data content as this “Alternative Uses Test” allows participants to think and give more creative answers than the previous one, so the data is having various kind of what and how each object can be used.