All Else Being Equal Be Empowered

The classical approach to using utility functions suffers from the drawback of having to design and tweak the functions on a case by case basis. Inspired by examples from the animal kingdom, social sciences and games we propose empowerment, a rather universal function, defined as the information-theoretic capacity of an agent’s actuation channel. The concept applies to any sensorimotoric apparatus. Empowerment as a measure reflects the properties of the apparatus as long as they are observable due to the coupling of sensors and actuators via the environment.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ECAL
• Authors: Alexander S. Klyubin, Daniel Polani, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
• Keywords: Agent’s Actuation Channel, Case Basis, ECAL 2005, Utility Functions Suffers