SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE
Why We Care About Understanding: Competence through Predictive Compression
What is the relation between understanding and compression, and why does human understanding take such a heavily compressed form? Across information theory, machine learning, and AI research, a substantial tradition identifies understanding with compression-a thought captured in Gregory Chaitin's dictum that "comprehension is compression." Philosophers, by contrast, have characterized understanding in terms of grasping connections, giving explanations, and handling novelty. This paper bridges the two pictures through three interlocking theses. The first concerns the concept of understanding: i
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Evidence & attribution
- arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · 2026-09-04T10:10:02.000Z
First collected: 2026-09-20T22:31:48.298Z. This is not the publication date.