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abstract
I will talk about two different ways in which things that appear bad, may actually do you good. The first part is about BadIdeas, a technique used over a number of years to encourage technical creativity and innovation. As well as the technique itself, I will talk about some of the reasons why it works and about tentative steps to understand the nature of technical creativity and at a crude level model it. The second part will focus on regret, this time starting with a tentative model of regret and then seeing how this was used to inspire a computational model to speed up simple machine learning. However, analysing the results of the computational model in turn suggests insights into the nature of human regret. Creativity and regret are linked in that they both involve a rich interplay between analytic/rational thinking and more emotional/imaginative insight.