Serendipity, the faculty of making fortunate and unexpected discoveries by accident, is recognized as playing a key role in sparking innovation. However, its unmanageability seems to have kept it as a relatively unexplored subject of research. In this chapter we claim that, although it may not be possible to program serendipity, it is possible to program for serendipity. The chapter begins by commenting on the nature of serendipity before it presents Max, a software agent that uses simple information retrieval techniques and heuristic search to uncover information aimed at stimulating serendipitous insights.
Keywords
serendipity chance discovery
Subject
Serendipity
Book Chapter
Readings in Chance Discovery, Advanced Knowledge International, March 2005
Cited by
Year 2007 : 1 citations
Wikipedia.fr (2007) Bibliographie sur la sérendipité, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliographie_sur_la_s%c3%a9rendipit%c3%a9
(current Dec 22, 2007).
Year 2006 : 1 citations
Tan, T.Z., Quek, C., and Ng, G.S. (2006). Chance Discovery using Complementary Learning Fuzzy Neural Network. In Y. Ohsawa and S. Tsumoto (eds.), Chance Discoveries in Real World Decision Making: Data-based Interaction of Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 30, pp. 117-134, Springer.
