[DevRob] Simple Theory of 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.

Overview site with papers (1990-2008) 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: Jobs related to this topic: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/eu2009.html
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