In December 2008, Juergen Schmidhuber, a German computer scientist, published a paper titled Driven by Compression Progress. This very influential paper, in the study of cross-disciplinary creativity, argued that the simple principle of compression is at the heart of everything.
Schmidhuber and his team point out that a simple algorithmic principle based on the notions of data compression and data compression progress informally explains fundamental aspects of attention, novelty, surprise, interestingness, curiosity, creativity, subjective beauty, jokes, and science & art in general.
In simple words, what does compression mean?
Compression says that ideas need to be boiled down to their most pure, dense, rich essence.
“The world can be explained to a degree by compressing it,” says Schmidhuber. Basically, our brain prizes efficiency. If it can remember one thing instead of ten, it’s happy.
Good communication is often compression, packaging up tangled thoughts into neat little words with agreed-upon meanings.
Love is compression, fusing a series of experiences, memories, feelings, and thoughts into an exhilarating state of mind.
Einstein changed physics with an incredibly succinct equation E equals MC squared.
Jokes boil down just to the punch line.
Compressed ideas can travel farther and faster. Not only through the communication channels like the internet but also through human minds.
One of the most famous and clear examples of compression is Picasso’s Bull. Picasso was a master of compression. He painted a series of 11 lithographs, his goal – to find the “essence” of the beast in a series of progressively simpler images.
He starts with a lively and realistic drawing of the bull. Next, he adds expression and power, making the beast even more evocative.
And then he stops building and starts dissecting. He keeps the lines that follow the contours of its muscles and skeleton and takes away everything else. In the subsequent images, he is simplifying and outlines just the major parts of its anatomy.
The compression continues in the final 5 images, as Picasso starts to understand the balance of form in the animal, and how weight is distributed between the front and the back. He removes structural lines of support that are no longer needed. He finishes the drawing with a final image, encasing what he has discovered are the most essential elements in a taut, nearly continuous outline. Along the way, he drops the bull’s head to emphasize the horns.
The result is a stunningly simple line drawing that somehow still captures the fundamental spirit of a bull.
“A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions.” Pablo Picasso.
Picasso did line sketches of several animals. I tried to copy his sketches, but it was hard to get the line control. Picasso, too probably wouldn’t have achieved this in one step – the learning curve would have been too steep. He once described this process as “charging up” his arm with the essence of the animal. He often wouldn’t keep the whole sequence, turning the canvas upside down and painting over it at each stage.
Nike compressed its entire marketing philosophy down into just three words, Just do it. And then they compress that slogan into a symbol that is so recognizable all around the world, but it doesn’t even need the Nike’s name.
All of these examples show that compression is at the heart of creative excellence in every field.
When you compress your ideas, they automatically get better.
When you remove the parts that are merely good they no longer dilute the parts that are truly great.
We, writers, are compressors by profession. Our role is to explain complex ideas. To distill them down to the basics so that readers can get the gist of them without getting tangled in the fluff.