We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
MiS Preprint
2/2021
Apportionment of work among environment, body and brain of an agent
Carlotta Langer and Nihat Ay
Abstract
An embodied agent, that performs a goal-directed action, influences its environment and gets influenced by it. Hence information flows not only among the agents control mechanisms, but also between the agent and its environment. In this article we combine different theories in order to create a framework in which we are able to closely examine the information flow among the body, brain and environment of an agent. We test this framework in a simple experimental setup. There the agents do not learn to perform a task, but we calculate the optimal behavior using the method Planning as Inference, in which the information geometric em-algorithm is used to optimize the likelihood of the goal. Then we analyze the resulting distribution using information theoretic methods including measures corresponding to the concepts of Morphological Computation and Integrated Information Theory. Comparing the behavior of these measures under changing morphological circumstances highlights the asymmetric relationship between these two concepts.
