CONCEPT
Compression Progress Theory
Jürgen Schmidhuber’s unified account of beauty, curiosity, humor, and scientific discovery as a single computable quantity—the rate at which an observer’s ability to compress its experience improves.
Compression progress theory begins with a deceptively simple move: to compress data is to find a shorter description of it, to discover the regularity that lets you represent something complicated with something simple. An observer, Schmidhuber argues, is continuously trying to compress the stream of its experience. Beauty, in this framework, attaches to data that compresses well given what the observer already knows—the simpler the description, the more beautiful. But mere beauty produces no drive, because perfectly compressible objects are already understood and therefore boring. What holds attention is the first derivative of beauty:
interestingness, the moment when an observer who could not compress something suddenly learns how. Newton compressed the falling apple and the orbiting moon into a single equation; the thrill of that unification is compression progress made conscious.
Schmidhuber applies the same principle to humor, art, and the practice of science, deriving a unified account of the aesthetic and intellectual life from a single quantity that can be specified, computed, and maximized. The implications