Curiosity and Compression as Complex Systems

From Santa Fe Institute

Dale Zhou, University of California, Irvine Curiosity drives us to explore vast amounts of information, while compression distills this abundance into memory structures that guide action. We examined three styles of curiosity - the wandering "busybody," the focused "hunter," and the creative "dancer"- by studying behavior in both lab settings and a large-scale naturalistic dataset of 482,760 Wikipedia readers across 14 languages and 50 countries. By modeling readers as biased random walkers a...