Simple Theory of Intrinsic Reward, Surprise, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Beauty, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

[Schmidhuber Juergen]

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes (2008). Based on keynote talk for KES 2008 and joint invited lecture for ALT 2007 / DS 2007. Variants to appear in SICE Journal & Proc. ABIALS. arXiv preprint: http://arXiv.org/abs/0812.4360 

Abstract. 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.

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

PS: Overview site with papers (1990-2008) on the theory of surprise & interestingness & intrinsic rewards & attention & curiosity etc: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html
Jobs related to this topic: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/eu2009.html