Idea Ripper // ArchiveCards: 1555 [Live] | Updated: 2026-10-14
Card #c720IR // #c720Synthesis

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)

[Use when]

Use when designing anything meant to hold attention: the target is learnable regularity, not noise.

[Why it matters]

Kills the Shannon definition of surprise — mere unpredictability — and replaces it with learnability. Surprise that teaches is the only surprise that counts.

More from Driven by Compression Progress

#c718This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning…Use when judging whether something is boring: ask whether the data went flat, or whether your learning curve… #c719I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once…Use when the same thing bores you now that electrified you a year ago: you compressed it, and the derivative… #c721Neither the arbitrary nor the fully predictable is truly novel or surprising—only data with still unknown algorithmic regularities areUse when someone mistakes randomness for novelty, or familiarity for depth.