Driven by Compression Progress

Interestingness is a derivative

This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Data becomes interesting by itself

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.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Curiosity, defined

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.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Neither the arbitrary nor the predictable

Neither the arbitrary nor the fully predictable is truly novel or surprising—only data with still unknown algorithmic regularities are

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Beautiful is not interesting

What’s beautiful is not necessarily interesting. A beautiful thing is interesting only as long as it is new, that is, as long as the algorithmic regularity that makes it simple has not yet been fully assimilated by the adaptive observer who is still learning to compress the data better.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Consciousness as a compression by-product

There is one thing that is involved in all actions and sensory inputs of the agent, namely, the agent itself. To efficiently encode the entire data history, it will profit from creating some sort of internal symbol or code (e. g., a neural activity pattern) representing the agent itself. Whenever this representation is actively used, say, by activating the corresponding neurons through new incoming sensory inputs or otherwise, the agent could be called self-aware or conscious.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

The data is holy

the data is holy as it is the only basis of all that can be known about the world.

— Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Discovery, defined

An unusually large compression breakthrough deserves the name discovery.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Reward improvements, not errors

one should not focus on the errors of the predictor, but on its improvements.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

The twin boredoms

It will get bored by things that already are subjectively compressible. It will also get bored by things that are currently incompressible but will apparently remain so

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Scientists are artists

scientists are very much like artists. They actively select experiments in search for simple but new laws compressing the resulting observation history.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

The joke mechanism

comedians also tend to combine well-known concepts in a novel way such that the observer’s subjective description of the result is shorter than the sum of the lengths of the descriptions of the parts, due to some previously unnoticed regularity shared by the parts.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

The mirror prototype

What they see every day in the mirror will influence their subjective prototype face, for simple reasons of coding efficiency.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

Prewire curiosity

the curiosity drive is such a general and generally useful concept for limited-resource RL in rare-reward environments that it should be prewired, as opposed to be learnt from scratch

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)

The song rule

He should try a song that is unfamiliar enough to contain somewhat unexpected harmonies or melodies or beats etc., but familiar enough to allow for quickly recognizing the presence of a new learnable regularity or compressibility in the sound stream.

— In our words · Source: Driven by Compression Progress (Jürgen Schmidhuber)