Artificial curiosity - Curiosity is what drives most self-directed learning in humans. When we encounter a gap in our knowledge, our interest may be sparked, creating a desire to seek out the missing information. Emulating the behavior of a curious human in an algorithm could enhance the potential for self-directed machine learning so that an AI system would be driven to seek out or develop solutions to unfamiliar problems.
According to Juergen Schmidhuber’s simple formal theory of surprise & novelty & interestingness & attention & creativity & intrinsic motivation, curious agents are interested in learnable but yet unknown regularities and get bored by both predictable and inherently unpredictable things. His active reinforcement learners translate mismatches between expectations and reality into /curiosity rewards/ or /intrinsic rewards/ for curious, creative, exploring agents who like to observe/create truly surprising aspects of the world, to learn novel patterns. It is important to highlight the importance of the capability to “get bored”.
“Self awareness combined with an absence of self-absorption”
from “Triumphs of Experience” George E. Vaillant
Many of us spend this year observing and reflecting. Nine months into the pandemic many artists are sharing the work that reflect their experience. This is the work by Ariel Orozco called “Have a seat and let me tell you”. Each “painting” in the exhibition was made to mimic the back of a truck and its tail lights, and the flickering, a looped record of one route com muricated in Morse code. An interesting example between painting, installation, and performance.
Work reference: [Have a seat and let me tell you | Artsy]
Last week I have attended an exhibit ‘Sleeping Giant’ at the Poster Museum. The exhibit explores China’s economic relationship with the world through poster design. A couple of years ago, I have roamed the residential area of Shanghai in search of Propaganda Poster Art Museum that hosted old propaganda posters. This exhibit in New York was much easier to find: 23rd and 7th Ave.
An interesting discovery was the style called yuefenpai. Yuefenpai is a type of calendar poster that was prevalent in Shanghai during the early 20th century and were influenced by Western advertisements. They were a marketing sensation and became key publicity tools to promote everyday products including cigarettes, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. These posters are a striking visualization of shifting societal values as relates to position of women in society and position of products in our lives.
But then the exhibit also had an interesting selection of posters that communicated the modernization of China. In the 1980th Shenzhen became a hotbed of graphic design talent. Designers explored international styles and their own creativity by making ads for China’s new domestic products, marketing global brands to local audiences and las. These posters had striking original design without loosing the traditional aesthetics.
Further reading: The Representation of Modern Women in Yuefenpai in 1920s and 1930s Shanghai:
Visualizing relationship with algorithm by Andreas Töpfer