Connectionists: Driven by compression progress

[Juergen Schmidhuber]

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle
Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty,
Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity,
Art, Science, Music, Jokes

Based on keynote talk for KES 2008 and
joint invited lecture for ALT 2007 / DS 2007

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, non-arbitrary, 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 recent artificial systems.

arXiv preprint: http://arXiv.org/abs/0812.4360
Overview site with previous papers on the theory of
surprise & interestingness & attention & curiosity etc:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html

Juergen Schmidhuber, TUM & IDSIA
http://www6.in.tum.de/Main/Schmidhu
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/

PS: Soon we will announce jobs related to this topic.