Hierarchical behaviours: getting the most bang for your bit
ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part II
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In the context of situated and embodied cognition, we evaluate an information-theoretic approach to the construction of the basic Umwelt of an artificial agent. We make the assumption that the construction of such a basic Umwelt is an emergent property of the coupling between the agent and its environment where the goal of the agent is to maximize its control abilities. An information-theoretic approach of the perception-action loop allows us to evaluate the capacity of the agent to inject information into its environment and to later recapture this information in its own sensors. We define a construction mechanism based on an automaton that generates internal states relevant to the agent in terms of perception-action loop. Optimizing this automaton leads to internal representations that can be a basis for the construction of the basic Umwelt of the agent. We illustrate the properties of the proposed mechanism in a simple example where an agent is acting in a box world. Simulation results show that this construction mechanism leads to a representation that captures important properties of the environment.