Abstract-We explore how information theoretic quantities such as potential information flow (empowerment) can be used as a drive toward complex collective behaviour in the context of multi-agent systems. In a first experiment, we investigate the empowerment of two agents interacting in a grid world. We show that some conditions lead to higher empowerment than others, depending on the amount of interaction and the amount of information shared by the agents. We then investigate more deeply the tradeoff between freedom of the agents and the constraints they impose on each other. We show that there exist a trade-off between these where empowerment is maximized. In a third experiment, we show that agents behaving so as to maximize potential information transfer over time generate a wide range of complex collective behaviours. We then discuss how these notions can be compared to what happens in natural systems.

Embodied agents can be conceived as entities perceiving and acting upon an external environment. Probabilistic models of this perception-action loop have paved the way to the investigation of information-theoretic aspects of embodied cognition. This formalism allows (i) to identify information flows and their limits under various scenarios and constraints, and (ii) to use informational quantities in order to induce the self-organization of the agent's behaviour without any externally specified drives. This paper extends the perception-action loop formalism to multiple agents. The multiple-access channel model is presented and used to identify the relationships between informational quantities of two agents interacting in the same environment. The central question investigated in this paper is the impact of coordination. Information-theoretic limits on what can be achieved with and without coordination are identified. For this purpose, different abstract channels are studied, along with a concrete example of agents interacting in space. It is shown that, under some conditions, self-organizing systems based on information-theoretic quantities have a tendency to spontaneously generate coordinated behaviour. Moreover, in the perspective of engineering such systems to achieve specific tasks, these information-theoretic limits put constraints on the amount of coordination that is required to perform the task, and consequently on the mechanisms that underly self-organization in the system.

No abstract

No abstract

???The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com???. Copyright Springer [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA