Driven by Compression Progress!

Currently reading the paper Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

And I read in the introduction: Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising. However, in the sense that it allows for “compression progress” because the regularity was not yet know.

The curiosity drive maximizes “interestingness” which is the first derivative of compressibility (or subjective beauty says the author). This first derivative* ,also says, is the steepness of the learning curve.

Curiosity is one of the biggest motivators from infants to geniuses to AI systems.

Steepness is also the first derivative of a function

Imagine that the function (blue line) is the learning curve which we also call compressibility/subjective beauty. Then the first derivative (the red line) is the steepness of the curve which according to the author is the curiosity drive (Goes up and down :).