It’s hard to imagine what on Earth bird’s nests have in common with artificial intelligence. Yet, I found myself today calling half of Reykjavik looking for someone who owns or has access to one.

Okay, so the deal is that a bird’s nest is an example of creativity in animals other than humans (it is, although it isn’t Al Yankovic creativity). I needed an picture of that for my latest publication and unfortunately I didn’t have one at hand.

I didn’t dare get one online, as you can never be certain if the licensing declarations are correct — so I had to just go ahead and start flipping through old family albums in hopes of finding one. That didn’t quite work out, so I started making calls. Now, for any other country — a zoo would have been an obvious choice. But Iceland doesn’t have a real zoo. We have a farm-animal zoo. Isn’t that exciting? (Come on, you get to pat the pigs!¹) And of course, all of their bird’s nests are artificial. How ironic. Here I am, an artificial intelligence developer on the hunt for natural creativity, and all I find are artificial constructs. Gargh.

Remarkably, as village-like as Reykjavik might seem to foreign eyes — we sure don’t have a lot of bird’s nests lying around. And not a lot of farm savviness either. Just the other day a girl my age I’m doing a project with reached into her purse and pulled up a shotgun shell. She then stared at me and asked “What is it?“. Somebody had given it to her and she’d been carrying it around for days, banging the purse against all kinds of things. She didn’t dare touch it after I told her what it was.

All went well in the end. My publication is ready. Funny, I didn’t realize until I was halfway through this hunt for a bird’s nest, how far I’d strayed from the stereotypical “Computer Science” activities. It felt a bit like being to artificial intelligence what Indiana Jones is to archaeology.

Now stay tuned for our next event, when I find myself traveling to an old, desolate and booby trapped temple in search of examples of historical creative efforts, and swapping the bag of sand for the Golden Algorithm.

¹Sense the irony.