Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepnotderp | Hacker News Reader

I view intrinsic curiosity as different from exploitation-exploration, the latter of which has its roots as far back as WWII and bandit problems.

Imho, curiosity is something fundamentally different than randomly trying new stuff in hopes of finding something with higher reward. Some of the artificial curiosity/intrinsic motivation work in RL seems to suggest this as well.

View on HN

This is the first I've heard about this topic, but what's different about intrinsic curiosity to me is that its a record, theres some of yourself in there, you are testing your own experiences against the world from a beginning point of recalled experience in the moment, rather than I guess exploitation-exploration is throwing things at the wall? But I'd guess that still comes from a place of intrinsic curiosity even if we can't see it.

>Imho, curiosity is something fundamentally different than

So what's it all about then? Go on, I'm curious...

If I knew then I would be in a pretty powerful position :)

But at least some starting point: exploration-exploitation is basically chasing something with a better outcome, for example, if I'm working on some project, I might look at random websites for hopes of finding something useful for that project, on the other hand, curiosity would be me just looking at things that are "interesting". Right now in RL artificial curiosity research we use novelty as a heuristic for "interesting" but we haven't really solved what "interesting" is yet I think.

Right! Curiosity could very well be about optimising the structure of one's existing knowledge rather than finding out new things per se. A distinctly non-random process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com