[oulipo2]

I think that creativity / intelligence / humour is indissociable from "making errors".

A joke is just an "error" - your brain predicted something, and the butt of the joke goes in another direction, and it's the mismatch that makes it funny.

The same goes with creativity, and intelligence.

The problem is that, by design, while trying to make machines "reliable", we make it impossible for them to be intelligent and creative

[lioeters]

In addition to the importance of making "mistakes", I would say "surprise" is a big element in creativity and humor. Perhaps these are related concepts, because a mistake is surprising. It's an unexpected departure from the normal routine and habit of behavior or thinking.

The term "surprisal" is used in information theory:

> For a given probability space, the measurement of rarer events are intuitively more "surprising", and yield more information content than more "common" events.

Can a machine surprise us? Given enough complexity, I think so. They can produce unpredictable results, even novelty, something we've never seen before. But does that mean a machine can be creative? Or funny? Maybe there's a threshold of acceptance, where eventually its output will become surprising enough that we might as well call it creative.