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

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. 1 Store and Compress and Reward Compression Progress If the history of the entire universe were computable [123, 124], and there is no evidence against this possibility [84], then its simplest explanation would be the shortest program that computes it [65, 70]. Unfortunately there is no general way of finding the shortest program computing any given data [34,37,106,107]. Therefore physicists have traditionally proceeded incrementally, analyzing just a small aspect of the world at any given time, trying to find simple laws that allow for describing their limited observations better than the best previously known law, essentially trying to find a program that compresses the observed data better than the best previously known program. For example, Newton’s law of gravity can be formulated as a short piece of code which allows for substantially compressing many observation sequences involving falling apples and other objects. Although its predictive power is limited—for example, it does First version of this preprint published 23 Dec 2008; revised April 2009. Variants are scheduled to appear as references [90] and [91] (short version), distilling some of the essential ideas in earlier work (1990-2008) on this subject: [57,58,59,60,61,68,72,76,108] and especially recent papers [81, 87, 88, 89]. G. Pezzulo et al.  under the assumption that the law holds. Einstein’s general relativity theory yields additional compression progress as it compactly explains many previously unexplained deviations from Newton’s predictions. Most physicists believe there is still room for further advances. Physicists, however, are not the only ones with a desire to improve the subjective compressibility of their observations. Since short and simple explanations of the past usually reflect some repetitive regularity that helps to predict the future as well, every intelligent system interested in achieving future goals should be motivated to compress the history of raw sensory inputs in response to its actions, simply to improve its ability to plan ahead. A long time ago, Piaget [49] already explained the explorative learning behavior of children through his concepts of assimilation (new inputs are embedded in old schemas—this may be viewed as a type of compression) and accommodation (adapting an old schema to a new input—this may be viewed as a type of compression improvement), but his informal ideas did not provide enough formal details to permit computer implementations of his concepts. How to model a compression progress drive in artificial systems? Consider an active agent interacting with an initially unknown world. We may use our general Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework of artificial curiosity (1990-2008)  to make the agent discover data that allows for additional compression progress and improved predictability. The framework directs the agent towards a better understanding the world through active exploration, even when external reward is rare or absent, through intrinsic reward or curiosity reward for actions leading to discoveries of previously unknown regularities in the action-dependent incoming data stream.