Really? I thought it was about building skills by just applying yourself. You don't learn guitar or Ruby in a night. You practice and play with them for years and integrate them into your projects.
I agree. If I made a robot that could follow musical notes and play the guitar perfectly, would anyone describe its playing the guitar as 'creative'? I hope not. This is a lab-like situation where we can know for sure that the robot is using zero creativity to play the guitar. It is just following instructions, it is not creating anything new.
However, if the robot could create new algorithms on the fly and could use them to tweak the way it played the guitar for the better, then we could say it is a creative robot.
Creative guitar players, like the second robot, invent new ways of playing a particular piece of music, or just a few seconds of it, to induce specific reactions in the listeners. This is creativity, and it seems to be rare not common, possibly because of how difficult it is to master the notes, and then to build rapport with the audience and manipulate their emotions.
Learning something is not a creative process, but finding better ways at doing it (after learning) makes you an artist. Same rule applies to learning following skills:
- Music
- A programming language
- Cooking
