Making genuinely creative programs is likely to remain a distant goal for AI until someone comes up with a suitable new idea. Therefore, it is worthwhile to chip pieces off the creativity problem and work on them separately. It seems that it is possible to study the notion of a creative solution to a problem apart from studying how a person or machine finds the solution.
Definition (informal): A solution to a problem is creative if it involves concepts not present in statement of the problem and the general knowledge surrounding it.
As a small step toward programs that find creative solutions, we consider how to express the idea of a solution concisely. The adequacy of an idea of a solution is relative to the background of the person or program that will complete the solution. Conciseness isolates the idea from the background.