Schmidhuber's Compression Progress Paper Explains Curiosity, Beauty and Jokes
blaizedsouza · x · 2026-10-27
The shared paper is Jürgen Schmidhuber's classic "Driven by Compression Progress" (2008), which offers a unified account of subjective beauty, novelty, surprise, curiosity, boredom, humor and music hooks: the brain is a relentless compression engine predicting and compressing the world.
- Fully predictable data is already compressed → boredom
- Pure randomness cannot be compressed → annoyance, tuning out
- Seemingly complex data where a hidden pattern suddenly clicks → a jump in compression progress → interest, surprise, curiosity
The paper defines interestingness as the first derivative of subjective beauty (compressibility), i.e., the steepness of the learning curve, and frames curiosity as the drive to discover non-random, yet-uncompressed regularities — explaining exploring infants, mathematicians, composers, comedians and artificial curiosity systems alike.
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