The Winter 2006 AI Magazine (vol. 27, no. 4) mentions a workshop in the field of Computational Aesthetics and I’m intrigued that such a thing exists. The article describes the field as an interdisciplinary group of researchers “working quite directly on the modeling and manipulation of people’s perceptions of beauty and happiness.” Sadly, it seems to be a silly bunch of things such as “laughter detection”, “automatic dream analysis”, and “affect-based story rewriting”, whatever that is supposed to mean. One sentence caught my eye though:
Aesthetic reactions such as the sense of novelty and the genre of suspense are often the result of expectation violation and may be governed by underlying “sweet-spot” equilibriums.
The AAAI digital library has papers from the workshop – I may have to see if there is anything interesting, or if they define “sweet-spot”.
