This paper describes a computational model for creativity in which surprise plays a central role. There is no doubt that creative products, being unexpected and unpredictable products, cause surprise. In order to make those products surprising and supported by recent evidences from neuroscience, which say emotions are biasing devices in decision-making, we defend that decisions made during the ...

What is your greatest research ambition? I would like to contribute to improving the integration of understanding of the functioning of organisms, and of their interactions with the environment across large ranges of time and space. This would help in making post-genomic information more relevant to investigating environmental issues, and suggesting to those working at the molecular-to-cellular...

As one of the most intensively studied transcription factors, it is unsurprising that p53 is involved in many biological processes, including cell cycle arrest, DNA repair, senescence and apoptosis.1 its activities are mainly regulated by posttranslational modifications and interactions with other cellular components. Over the past few years, p53 has also been linked to redox homeostasis, the b...

We examine a version of the surprise examination paradox using dynamic epistemic logic. We claim that the difficulties in the puzzle arise from the assumption that announcements are in general successful: the hearer will come to believe that they are true. This principle fails in certain specific cases, and we show that the announcement in the surprise exam paradox is an example. In dynamic epi...

This essay shows how Todd LaPorte’s work on reliability-seeking organizations contains insights for how we might understand the financial crisis of 2008–2009. In particular, the financial system was not perceived and described as critical infrastructure, there was a regulatory overemphasis on routine operational practices at the entity level, and there was insufficient countercyclical leadershi...

Surprise is informative because it drives attention [1] and modifies learning [2]. Correlates of surprise have been observed at different stages of neural processing, and found to be relevant for learning and memory formation [3]. Although surprise is ubiquitous, there is neither a widely accepted theory that quantitatively links surprise to observed behavior, such as the startle response, nor ...

Amidst a trickle of new species continually discovered in the heart of Borneo came a flash of excitement last autumn when a World Wildlife Fund camera trap in an Indonesian national park on the island photographed an small fox-like animal of unknown species, which was published last month. But before scientists might identify it, the dark red creature is already threatened by a proposed palm oi...

We model demand for non-instrumental information, drawing on the idea that people derive entertainment utility from suspense and surprise. A period has more suspense if the variance of the next period’s beliefs is greater. A period has more surprise if the current belief is further from the last period’s belief. Under these definitions, we analyze the optimal way to reveal information over time...

Inspired by the notion of surprise for unconventional discovery in computational creativity, we introduce a general search algorithm we name surprise search. Surprise search is grounded in the divergent search paradigm and is fabricated within the principles of metaheuristic (evolutionary) search. The algorithm mimics the self-surprise cognitive process of creativity and equips computational cr...