Driven by Compression Progress

I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful. Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, nonarbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial systems. First version of this preprint published 23 Dec 2008; revised 15 April 2009. Short version: [91]. Long version: [90]. We distill some of the essential ideas in earlier work (1990-2008) on ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: KES
• Authors: Jürgen Schmidhuber
• Keywords: Better Way, Information Technology, KES 2008, Subjective Observer, Traditional Sense