The Challenge and Reward of Fair Play in Narrative: A Computational Approach

ArXi:2507.13841v2 Announce Type: replace Good storytelling involves surprise -- unpredictability in how the story unfolds -- and sense-making, the requirement that the story forms a coherent sequence. However, to date, these two qualities have largely been addressed in isolation. We formalize these qualities and their relationship in an information-theoretic framework, using detective fiction as a paradigm case of narratives in which a hidden truth is discovered through reasoning.