Pith Number

pith:3THSXSGR

pith:2026:3THSXSGRMHX3KNDV6HRMG4YHCK

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Calibrated Surprise: An Information-Theoretic Account of Creative Quality

Bo Zou, Chao Xu

Creative quality is calibrated surprise: converging constraints shrink the space of choices until only low-probability options from an unconstrained view remain.

arxiv:2604.26269 v2 · 2026-04-29 · cs.CL · cs.AI · cs.LG

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{3THSXSGRMHX3KNDV6HRMG4YHCK}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

A mathematical corollary follows: full-dimensional accuracy and mediocrity are mutually exclusive -- two sides of one constraint structure, not separate goals.

C2weakest assumption

The author's intent, the reader's reasonable expectation, and the logic of reality act as independent constraints that can be jointly imposed to force the admissible set of writing choices into a narrow region whose size is directly captured by conditional entropy approaching zero.

C3one line summary

Creative writing quality is calibrated surprise: joint constraints collapse the solution space so surviving choices have high entropy but near-zero conditional entropy, measured by mutual information.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-05T01:14:39.649636Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

dccf2bc8d161efb53475f1e2c37307129a31cc28205cf75550c3154d519130fb

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.26269 · arxiv_version: 2604.26269v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.26269 · pith_short_12: 3THSXSGRMHX3 · pith_short_16: 3THSXSGRMHX3KNDV · pith_short_8: 3THSXSGR

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/3THSXSGRMHX3KNDV6HRMG4YHCK \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: dccf2bc8d161efb53475f1e2c37307129a31cc28205cf75550c3154d519130fb

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "c1febb5f5e8f789eded953d877b208266e11c8039355d61960177386e27ee156",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI",
      "cs.LG"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-29T03:53:31Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "a809ea6974ce69e3ac9cade8f6a02939d5008e6f2ef4f53e134d49b3e8f07bf2"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.26269",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}