Today's post, Complex Novelty was originally published on 20 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Are we likely to run out of new challenges, and be reduced to playing the same video game over and over? How large is Fun Space? This depends on how fast you learn; the faster you generalize, the more challenges you see as similar to each other. Learning is fun, but uses up fun; you can't have the same stroke of genius twice. But the more intelligent you are, the more potential insights you can understand; human Fun Space is larger than chimpanzee Fun Space, and not just by a linear factor of our brain size. In a well-lived life, you may need to increase in intelligence fast enough to integrate your accumulating experiences. If so, the rate at which new Fun becomes available to intelligence, is likely to overwhelmingly swamp the amount of time you could spend at that fixed level of intelligence. The Busy Beaver sequence is an infinite series of deep insights not reducible to each other or to any more general insight.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was High Challenge, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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