PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jaime Gomez-Ramirez
AU  - Tommaso Costa
TI  - Boredom begets creativity: a solution to the exploitation-exploration trade-off in predictive coding
AID  - 10.1101/104521
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 104521
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/31/104521.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/31/104521.full
AB  - Here, we investigate whether systems that minimize prediction error e.g. predictive coding, can also show creativity, or on the contrary, prediction error minimization unqualifies for the design of systems that respond in creative ways to non recurrent problems. We argue that there is a key ingredient that has been overlooked by researchers that needs to be incorporated to understand intelligent behavior in biological and technical systems. This ingredient is boredom. We propose a mathematical model based on the Black-Scholes-Merton equation which provides mechanistic insights into the interplay between boredom and prediction pleasure as the key drivers of behavior.