  What is the nature of curiosity? Is there any scientific way to understand
the origin of this mysterious force that drives the behavior of even the
stupidest naturally intelligent systems and is completely absent in their
smartest artificial analogs? Can we build AI systems that could be curious
about something, systems that would have an intrinsic motivation to learn? Is
such a motivation quantifiable? Is it implementable? I will discuss this
problem from the standpoint of physics. The relationship between physics and
intelligence is a consequence of the fact that correctly predicted information
is nothing but an energy resource, and the process of thinking can be viewed as
a process of accumulating and spending this resource through the acts of
perception and, respectively, decision making. The natural motivation of any
autonomous system to keep this accumulation/spending balance as high as
possible allows one to treat the problem of describing the dynamics of thinking
processes as a resource optimization problem. Here I will propose and discuss a
simple theoretical model of such an autonomous system which I call the
Autonomous Turing Machine (ATM). The potential attractiveness of ATM lies in
the fact that it is the model of a self-propelled AI for which the only
available energy resource is the information itself. For ATM, the problem of
optimal thinking, learning, and decision-making becomes conceptually simple and
mathematically well tractable. This circumstance makes the ATM an ideal
playground for studying the dynamics of intelligent behavior and allows one to
quantify many seemingly unquantifiable features of genuine intelligence.
