Constructing the Basic Umwelt of Artificial Agents: An Information-Theoretic Approach

Abstract. In the context of situated and embodied cognition, we evaluate an information-theoretic approach to the construction of the Umwelt of an artificial agent. We make the assumption that the construction of such an Umwelt is an emergent property of the coupling between the agent and its environment. We use an information-theoretic approach of the perception-action loop that 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. We argue that optimizing this automaton can lead to the internal representation that can be a basis for the construction of the Umwelt of the agent. We illustrate the properties the proposed mechanism in a simple example where an agent is acting in a box world. Simulation results show that this construction mechanism l...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ECAL
• Authors: Philippe Capdepuy, Daniel Polani, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Construction Mechanism, ECAL 2007, Information-theoretic Approach, Perception-action Loop