Maximizing Fun by Creating Data with Easily Reducible Subjective Complexity

The Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity (1990–2010) [Schmidhuber, J.: Formal theory of creativity, fun, and intrinsic motivation (1990–2010). IEEE Trans. Auton. Mental Dev. 2(3), 230–247 (2010b)] describes principles of a curious and creative agent that never stops generating nontrivial and novel and surprising tasks and data. Two modules are needed: a data encoder and a data creator. The former encodes the growing history of sensory data as the agent is interacting with its environment; the latter executes actions shaping the history. Both learn. The encoder continually tries to encode the created data more efficiently, by discovering new regularities in it. Its learning progress is the wow-effect or fun or intrinsic reward of the creator, which maximizes future expected reward, being motivated to invent skills leading to interesting data that the encoder does not yet know but can easily learn with little computational effort. I have argued that this simple formal principle explains science and art and music and humor. Note: This overview heavily draws on previous publications since 1990, especially Schmidhuber (2010b), parts of which are reprinted with friendly permission by IEEE.