Why turn around?

Q. Why is turning around from your front to your back interesting I asked Frida.

A. She suggested it might be because turning is an action that reduces the effective dimensionality of a large number of sensors. In other words, it produces a large number of correlated changes in multiple sensors, e.g vision, proprioception, etc... It is inherently perhaps more interesting to 'compress' a sensory stream, and predict that, instead of predicting the individual elements. This strongly suggests a combined compression and prediction algorithm, much like Simon McGregor and I talked about in one of my first papers (of which I am quite proud).

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1108940

So the suggested algorithm is,

1. Try to compress your sensory stream, and predict the future sensory states by decompressing.
2. Those future states that are most predictable with the most compression are the most interesting.
3. Probably Compression Progress must be the factor determining action selection.

Thats what Schmidhuber says, we've rediscovered him again. I'm guilty of Schmidhuberism.