Curiosity and AI

How do you build curiosity in a system.  And the ability to act on curiosity?  In a simplistic sense, mining for data and then ingesting it?   If you are a robot or drone with sensors your have an element of being able to reach out for it as well.  And measure the value of what you find.  Back to the 'Explore/Exploit' dilemma.  Mentioned by Brian Christian in his recent talk.   Good piece in AAAS:

Scientists imbue robots with curiosity  By Matthew Hutson 

In a twist on artificial intelligence (AI), computer scientists have programmed machines to be curious—to explore their surroundings on their own and learn for the sake of learning. The new approach could allow robots to learn even faster than they can now. Someday they might even surpass human scientists in forming hypotheses and pushing the frontiers of what’s known.

“Developing curiosity is a problem that’s core to intelligence,” says George Konidaris, a computer scientist who runs the Intelligent Robot Lab at Brown University and was not involved in the research. “It’s going to be most useful when you’re not sure what your robot is going to have to do in the future.”  .... " 

Over the years, scientists have worked on algorithms for curiosity, but copying human inquisitiveness has been tricky. For example, most methods aren’t capable of assessing artificial agents’ gaps in knowledge to predict what will be interesting before they see it. (Humans can sometimes judge how interesting a book will be by its cover.)

Todd Hester, a computer scientist currently at Google DeepMind in London hoped to do better. “I was looking for ways to make computers learn more intelligently, and explore as a human would,” he says. “Don’t explore everything, and don’t explore randomly, but try to do something a little smarter.”