{"id":40,"date":"2007-09-14T00:15:29","date_gmt":"2007-09-14T05:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=40"},"modified":"2007-09-14T00:24:21","modified_gmt":"2007-09-14T05:24:21","slug":"beauty-and-the-data-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=40","title":{"rendered":"Beauty and the data beast"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><em>A human lifetime lasts about 3 \u00d7 10^9 seconds. The human brain has roughly 10^10 neurons, each with 10^4 synapses on average. Assuming each synapse can store not more than 3 bits, there is still enough capacity to store the lifelong sensory input stream with a rate of roughly 10^5 bits\/s, comparable to the demands of a movie with reasonable resolution.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So says Jurgen &#8220;Trilby&#8221; Schmidhuber, professor of technical robotics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. How are we to make sense of all this information?<\/p>\n<p>Trilby Schmidhuber&#8217;s answer is that our brains look for ways of a-squeezin and a-squashin it: data compression is what them computer bods call it.<\/p>\n<p>Where Trilby sticks his neck out  is in equating certain types of compression with particular human experiences. So the experience of compressing the data associated with the symmetries in a human face is what we call beauty.  And an unusually large compression breakthrough is what we call a discovery. For example, different apples tend to fall off their trees in similar ways. The discovery of a law underlying the acceleration of all falling apples helps to greatly compress the recorded data, he says.<\/p>\n<p>Ya gotta admire Trilby. Let&#8217;s face it, we ain&#8217;t gotta clue about the nature of human experience. So any ruminatin&#8217; philosopher has carte blanche to expound any manner of hocus pocus. But at some level, human experience is essentially a phenomenon of information, so maybe it ain&#8217;t so crazy to attempt to describe it in this way.<\/p>\n<p>Trouble is, physicists are still a-wondrin and a-speculatin over the nature of information too. So it&#8217;s a brave man who wades into the debate over human experience with an argument based on data compression.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s wish him luck, he&#8217;s gonna need it.<\/p>\n<p>Ref: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0709.0674http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0709.0674\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0709.0674<\/a>: Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity &amp; Creativity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A human lifetime lasts about 3 \u00d7 10^9 seconds. The human brain has roughly 10^10 neurons, each with 10^4 synapses on average. Assuming each synapse can store not more than 3 bits, there is still enough capacity to store the lifelong sensory input stream with a rate of roughly 10^5 bits\/s, comparable to the demands [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seein-the-light"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}