.
Jürgen Schmidhuber's motivation
.

How to Build an Optimal Scientist?

.
For several years, Schmidhuber's brother Christof (a theoretical physicist @ Munich, Caltech, Princeton, Bern, CERN) lived next door to Einstein's former apartment in Bern, Switzerland.

More links: Deep Learning, Feedback Neural Networks, Pattern Recognition, Universal AI, Optimal Problem Solvers, Evolution, Reinforcement learning (RL), Hierarchical RL, Meta-Learning or learning to learn, Artificial Curiosity & Creativity & Intrinsic Motivation & Developmental Robotics, Theory of Beauty, Computable Universes, Generalized Algorithmic Information

First Schmidhuber will build a scientist better than himself (his colleagues claim that should be easy) who will then do the remaining work.

He cannot see any more efficient way of using and multiplying the little creativity he has got.

This already motivated his diploma thesis on metalearning and recursive self-improvement (1987), where he applied Genetic Programming (GP) to itself, to recursively evolve better GP methods.

This also motivated his work on the Gödel machine (since 2003), which formalizes I. J. Good's informal remarks (1965) on an "intelligence explosion" through self-improving "super-intelligences".

Compare CIO article on Schmidhuber's work (The ideal scientist, 6/2/04, 5 pages, in German).

See also the interviews in HPlus Magazine (1/5/2010): Build An Optimal Scientist, Then Retire, and in The Next Big Future (1/18/2011)

Einstein once said:

Ich habe wenig Geduld mit Wissenschaftlern, die sich ein Brett suchen und an der dünnsten Stelle zu bohren anfangen.

Check out the formal theory of creativity (1990-2010) which explains science, art, music, humor, and describes the simple algorithmic principles of artificial scientists & artists.

Robots: Learning Robots, Elastic Robots, Robot Population Explosion, Statistical Robotics, Resilient Machines, Resilient Robots (Science 316 p 688), CoTeSys Robots, Cogbotlab, Robot Cars

The formal theory of creativity by Juergen Schmidhuber explains the desire to learn motor skills, to do science, to produce art Goedel machine Universal AI Computing the Universe Publications

.