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

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

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 16:59:56 GMT

Schmidhuber : https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

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

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 07:44:53 GMT

Schmidthuber has an answer: https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 For a more practical approach you need to use proxies: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/articles/what-an-automated...

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

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

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:18:23 GMT

Schmidhuber did it first: Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

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

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 11:05:37 GMT

(Somewhat) related Schmidhuber https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

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

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 20:46:11 GMT

Driven by Compression Progress

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

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

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 11:01:41 GMT

Schmidhuber reached your conclusions first. Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

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

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 17:52:31 GMT

Driven by Compression Progress (Schmidhuber, 2008)

2 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

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

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 16:36:14 GMT

Driven by Compression Progress (2008)

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

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

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 11:09:52 GMT

reminds me of https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 > 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…

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

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 18:01:10 GMT

Driven By Compression Progress (2008)

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes — mentioned by 0xBABAD00C

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 07:01:57 GMT

If your job is to attract an agent that is playing a careful balance between exploration and exploitation, while on tight computational budget, then you want to attract them with some initial hooks (e.g. bright colors) and appease their computational risk assessment module with high compressibility (e.g. symmetries and self-similar patterns). https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360

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

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 17:38:01 GMT

Driven By Compression Progress (2009) [pdf]

15 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

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

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 05:14:35 GMT

First, the competition does place a time limit (in fact several resource limits). I agree that it may be too lax to judge consumer-oriented compression algorithms. That is not what this competition is about. The goal is maximizing compression ratio - with the aim of affecting AI. Since an AI system can be seen as a lossy compression where some worldly input is compressed into something that we hope mimics "understanding". Improvements in compression may translate to AI advances [0] and potentially vice versa. To draw a parallel away from computing: One could say we are compressors that…

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

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 09:13:28 GMT

There's a paper by Schmidhuber [1] in which he argues, IIRC, that not the surprise as in high or just-right entropy is what satisfies the observer of e.g. art, but the fact that it teaches you a new, previously unknown pattern of regularity about the world which allows you to compress information better. I may be misconstruing it though b/c it's been a while since I looked into it. On another note, Brian Eno has cited Morse Peckham's "Man's Rage for Chaos"[2], which seems to be more in line with what you are saying and to claim that the purpose of art is offering surprising shifts in…

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

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 19:59:24 GMT

Driven by Compression Progress (2009)

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

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

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 17:37:19 GMT

Driven by Compression Progress (Schmidhuber, 2009)

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

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

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 14:58:25 GMT

Driven by Compression Progress (Schmidhuber, 2008)

3 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

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

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 06:42:12 GMT

https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 Juergen Schmidhuber - Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes (2002)

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

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

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 01:32:31 GMT

allow me to make your day: - Computational trinitarianism, or how 1.) propositions as types, 2.) programs as proofs, and 3.) the relation between type theory and category theory are one and the same thing [0] - Scott aaronson's excellent "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" [1] - "From Philosophy to Program Size" by Greg Chaitin. Arguably Chaitin's work (notably Chaitin's omega) is a quintessential example of what lies at the intersection of mathematics, computation, and philosophy.[2] - From the inimitable Juergen Schmidhueber, "Driven by Compression Progress: A…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

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

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 22:53:24 GMT

Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity,

4 points; 2 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.