Idea Ripper // ArchiveCards: 1555 [Live] | Updated: 2026-10-14
Card #c718IR // #c718Synthesis

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)

[Use when]

Use when judging whether something is boring: ask whether the data went flat, or whether your learning curve did.

[Why it matters]

The paper's master equation. Interestingness is not a property of data — it is the rate of change of your compression of it. That reframes boredom, taste, and novelty as facts about the observer's trajectory, not about the object.

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