Schmidhuber's Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity Dates Back to a 2009 Japanese Journal Paper
hardmaru · x · 2026-10-04
hardmaru highlights that Schmidhuber's Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity was published in full in a Japanese SICE journal back in 2009 (Vol. 48, Issue 1). The theory frames compression progress as the common basis of subjective beauty, novelty, surprise, curiosity, art, science, music, and even jokes: data becomes interesting when an observer learns to compress or predict it better, and curiosity is the drive to seek compressible, 'truly novel' regularity — maximizing the steepness of the learning curve. hardmaru notes it's remarkable this framework was laid out in full formal detail 15+ years ago.
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