found_drama

What I really want for Xmas: the official FUH2 poster (WARNING: Flash link…) - - And if you browse the submissions, you’ll find our contribution. July 31, 2005.

A couple days ago I commented on a recent article out of USC (that I saw mentioned on BoingBoing) that proclaimed: “While surprise is not a new concept it had lacked a formal definition, broad enough to capture the intuitive meaning of the term, yet quantitative and computable.” The part that I’d taken issue with was the lacked a formal definition part, citing Rescorla & Wagner (1972) and Pearce & Hall (1980) (with a substantial nod to A for confirming the references) had pretty well accounted for surprise in their research. So I fired off just such a question to the researchers from USC.

Happy to say that I got a resposne today! Laurent Itti replied with a well-reasoned argument for the differences between their theory and that of Rescorla & Wagner (no mention of Pearce & Hall though). Here’s a snip from the reply:

[Rescorla & Wagner] tell you how a given amount of surprise translates into some amount of learning; we tell you what amount of surprise a given stimulus may elicit in a given observer.

I’ll take that. Sciences and the semantics of specificity do tend to go hand-in-hand, don’t they?

currently playing: Atomica “Larsen”

The headline should have been “TiVo! Inexplicable, Unwanted Features For Everyone!” Wasn’t the point to skip commercials? Or if not the point, at least a major benefit? Or have we officially entered some sort of Wallace/Cronenberg alternate reality? Really and truly frightening.

Grabbed verbatim from Neil Gaiman’s blog:

I’m not sure. There’s definitely something that tells you whether an idea has legs or not — but for me, it’s still, often as not, trial and error. My two favourite stories of the last few years, “A Study In Emerald” and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” both started as conceits that didn’t work, that I put aside, ready to abandon, and then thought, days or weeks later “Hang on, what if I…?” and they both wrote themselves extremely fast after that. Both of them would have been abandoned though if they hadn’t had good, insistent editors (Michael Reaves and Jonathan Strahan respectively) and the need to get a story out of unpromising fragments.

It’s not a science. It’s an art and a sometimes it’s a craft. The most important thing (and I know I say this a lot but it’s true, or at least it’s true for me) is finishing things, because that’s when you find out if they worked or not. The rest of the time it’s just hoping. And if you stop writing when a promising beginning runs out of steam, maybe you need something more in the planning stages. Or maybe you just need to soldier madly onward and see what Chance and Necessity (the mother, it must be remembered, of invention) provide.

Makes me feel like I’m on the right track.