[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.