What motivates children to learn? Exploring and playing? Can the same motivation be used to teach a robot to communicate? "To experience optimal learning progress, it must avoid situations already familiar but also situations where nothing can be learned" In other words getting bored and frustrated are crucial to the learning process too. Pierre-Yves Oudeyer of the Sony's Computer Science Lab in Paris explores these ideas in his new paper, Discovering Communication. This is related to Oudeyer's Intelligent Adaptive Curiousity work and his theories on the self-organization of language, which we've reported on in the past.