While intrinsically motivated learning agents hold considerable promise to overcome limitations of more supervised learning systems, quantitative evaluation and theoretical analysis of such agents are difficult. We propose to consider a restricted setting for autonomous learning where systematic evaluation of learning performance is possible. In this setting the agent needs to learn to navigate in a Markov Decision Process where extrinsic rewards are not present or are ignored. We present a

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... ning algorithm for this scenario and evaluate it by the amount of exploration it uses to learn the environment.