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.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures, based on KES 2008 keynote and ALT 2007 / DS 2007 joint invited lectur

Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991

In 2020, we will celebrate that many of the basic ideas behind the deep learning revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" or "Miraculous Year" 1990-1991 at TU Munich. Back then, few people were interested, but a quarter century later, neural networks based on these ideas were on over 3 billion devices such as smartphones, and used many billions of times per day, consuming a significant fraction of the world's compute.Comment: 37 pages, 188 references, based on work of 4 Oct 201