First time seeing a wild giraffe. Just chillin’ on the side of the road.

They say don’t meet your heroes, but I traveled to South Africa and met mine and it was worth it. Stoffel the Honey Badger became a major inspiration for my PhD thesis when my advisor showed our lab a BBC show on clever animals who can solve long horizon tasks, presumably for abstract reasons.

Unfortunately for SlipFrosty, a theory of instrumental intelligence is inseparable from a theory of normative intelligence. Abolish the value function!

For me it was this book. As someone who works on Markov Decision Processes, I'm interested in the way computational processes have to be supported by thermodynamic principles to do work on behalf of a biological system--still feel like this book guides my instincts today.

Coming over from twitter, please give me a follow! My thesis below is on the connection between compositional planning and intrinsic motivation for self-preserving agents 🙂

drive.google.com/file/d/1peG7...