License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/DagSemProc.09291.14
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-21970
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2009/2197/
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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.

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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 (since 1990) artificial systems.
Compare overview sites with previous papers (1990-2009) on the formal
theory of subjective beauty and creativity:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html
and http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{schmidhuber:DagSemProc.09291.14,
  author =	{Schmidhuber, Juergen},
  title =	{{Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes.}},
  booktitle =	{Computational Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Approach},
  pages =	{1--35},
  series =	{Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings (DagSemProc)},
  ISSN =	{1862-4405},
  year =	{2009},
  volume =	{9291},
  editor =	{Margaret Boden and Mark D'Inverno and Jon McCormack},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2009/2197},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-21970},
  doi =		{10.4230/DagSemProc.09291.14},
  annote =	{Keywords: Subjective Beauty, Surprise, Interestingness, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes}
}

Keywords: Subjective Beauty, Surprise, Interestingness, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes
Collection: 09291 - Computational Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Approach
Issue Date: 2009
Date of publication: 07.10.2009

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