Search Trees and Human Perception of Creativity

We present empirical evidence that human perception of creativity is correlated with how difficult the search problem for the creative solution is. We use a large dataset of high-quality annotations of chess moves as "brilliant", as well as present a novel dataset of human reactions to Wordle games. In both the analysis of expert-annotated brilliant moves in chess and the small-scale analysis of Wordle, we show that when a play requires a particular shape of search tree, it is more likely to be perceived as brilliant or creative, over and above the quality of the move in the case of chess. Although human creativity is complex and multifaceted, our work indicates that the mathematical structure of the search problem being solved is likely part of what we think of as creativity, across at least two domains.