“For efficiency's sake, an intelligent system should be willing and
able to add new facts, but should be {\it eager} to add surprising new facts.
Surprises can only be noticed by contrast with {\it expectations}, so an intelligent
system should maintain a context of expectations and filter incoming observations
against that. Furthermore, expectations and surprises can aid an intelligent
system in comparing its model and processing of the domain to the real world.
Through such monitoring, discrepencies may be found and diagnosed, leading to
changes in the model making it more consistent with observed behavior. Our
discussion here centers on the importance of using such expectations
to focus and filter intelligent processing.}<p>\yskip<p>The world bombards our senses with data, much more than we can process
in detail in real time; yet we can't live in a hundred times real time.
We survive by ignoring most of that data, or, more precisely, by knowing
(almost immediately deciding)
what can be ignored. We maintain a set of expectations, against
which the incoming torrent is matched. Almost all of it will match those
expectations, and we then need merely process the unexpected inputs, the
surprising observations. We reserve our computing for those opportunities
which promise us genuine new facts, rather than reconfirmation of known ones.” -- COG3. listed under <a href="https://www.saildart.org/[AM,DBL]/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.saildart.org/[AM,DBL]/</a>