Surprise

About: Surprise is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4371 publications have been published within this topic receiving 99386 citations.

What to expect when you're expecting: The role of unexpectedness in computationally evaluating creativity.

Abstract: Novelty, surprise and transformation of the domain have each been raised – alone or in combination – as accompaniments to value in the determination of creativity. Spirited debate has surrounded the role of each factor and their relationships to each other. This paper suggests a way by which these three notions can be compared and contrasted within a single conceptual framework, by describing each as a kind of unexpectedness. Using this framing we argue that current computational models of novelty, concerned primarily with the originality of an artefact, are insufficiently broad to capture creativity, and that other kinds of expectation – whatever the terminology used to refer to them – should also be considered. We develop a typology of expectations relevant to computational creativity evaluation and, through it describe a series of situations where expectations would be essential to the characterisation of creativity.

Strategic surprise and the september 11 attacks

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This essay examines the failure to anticipate the terrorist attacks of September 11 from four perspectives: cognitive biases of government analysts and policy makers concerned with terrorism, organizational pathologies of key bureaucracies such as the CIA and the FBI, political and strategic errors of senior government officials, and the unusual nature of al Qaeda. Drawing on past studies of strategic surprise, it argues that agencies such as the CIA at times did impressive work against the terrorist organization, but that in general the U.S. government, and the U.S. intelligence community in particular, lacked a coherent approach for triumphing over the skilled terrorists it faced. In hindsight, it is clear that numerous mistakes at all levels of the U.S. government and the broader U.S. analytic community made strategic surprise more likely.

In Denmark, Afghanistan is worth dying for: How public support for the war was maintained in the face of mounting casualties and elusive success:

Abstract: Much to their own surprise, successive Danish governments have succeeded in maintaining the highest level of public support among the nations contributing to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, while ...

Learning unknown event models

Abstract: Agents with incomplete environment models are likely to be surprised, and this represents an opportunity to learn. We investigate approaches for situated agents to detect surprises, discriminate among different forms of surprise, and hypothesize new models for the unknown events that surprised them. We instantiate these approaches in a new goal reasoning agent (named FOOLMETWICE), investigate its performance in simulation studies, and report that it produces plans with significantly reduced execution cost in comparison to not learning models for surprising events.