Can Curiosity Be Programmed?

destinyland writes "AI researcher Jurgen Schmidhuber says his main scientific ambition 'is to build an optimal scientist, then retire.' The Cognitive Robotics professor has worked on problems including artificial ants and even robots that are taught how to tie shoelaces using reinforcement learning, but he believes algorithms can be written that allow the programming of curiosity itself. 'Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising...' He's already created art using algorithmic information theory, and can describe the simple algorithmic principle that underlies subjective beauty, creativity, and curiosity itself. And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program."

Comments

curiosity 0.1

[Anonymous Coward]

#!/bin/sh
for i in who what where when why how; do
    echo "But $i, dad?"
done

I hereby submit this project to the /. community under the GPL v2.

Coding For Patterns of Anomalies

[neorush]

Aren't we really just talking about coding for patterns of anomalies? We know how to code for patterns, we know how to code for anomalies. Isn't it a matter of processing huge data sets and looking for patterns that have not been recorded before? Of course, you could argue that whether or not the pattern is relevant is the big problem, but curiosity is not necessarily about relevance.

Re:Physics of computing the universe

[ScytheLegion]

I'll be programming all of this tomorrow... on my new iPad

Re:Physics of computing the universe

[Profane MuthaFucka]

There's a workaround. You don't need to simulate the entire universe at one time, and there's no way that anything inside the universe would ever be able to tell that huge swaths of the universe aren't being actively simulated.

Reasoning: If a universe simulator needs to have more states than exist inside the universe (we're both assuming this) then then any process which verifies the universe simulator would also need to have more states than exist inside the universe. Therefore, the universe can only be fully simulated from outside the universe, and you could only determine that the universe was fully simulated from outside the universe. From inside the universe, all you could simulate and all you could check would be a subset of the universe you are in.

So you could actually pull off a neat trick, just like the human eye does. The human eye doesn't actually see clearly except in the very middle of the vision. But, wherever you look, whatever you're looking at is clearly resolved. Your brain gets the distinct impression that it's looking at the entire scene clearly, except it's not. Only the part that it's actually looking at is clear.

Well, that's enough hacking of the universe for today. I need a beer.