Workshop on Information Theoretic Incentives for Artificial Life

For those interested in the topics of information theory in biology and artificial life, Christoph Salge, Georg Martius, Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi, and Daniel Polani have announced a Satellite Workshop on Information Theoretic Incentives for Artificial Life at the 14th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALife 2014) to be held at the Javits Center, New York, on July 30 or 31st.

Their synopsis states:

Artificial Life aims to understand the basic and generic principles of life, and demonstrate this understanding by producing life-like systems based on those principles. In recent years, with the advent of the information age, and the widespread acceptance of information technology, our view of life has changed. Ideas such as “life is information processing” or “information holds the key to understanding life” have become more common. But what can information, or more formally Information Theory, offer to Artificial Life?

One relevant area is the motivation of behaviour for artificial agents, both virtual and real. Instead of learning to perform a specific task, informational measures can be used to define concepts such as boredom, empowerment or the ability to predict one’s own future. Intrinsic motivations derived from these concepts allow us to generate behaviour, ideally from an embodied and enactive perspective, which are based on basic but generic principles. The key questions here are: “What are the important intrinsic motivations a living agent has, and what behaviour can be produced by them?”

Related to an agent’s behaviour is also the question on how and where the necessary computation to realise this behaviour is performed. Can information be used to quantify the morphological computation of an embodied agent and to what degree are the computational limitations of an agent influencing its behaviour?

Another area of interest is the guidance of artificial evolution or adaptation. Assuming it is true that an agent wants to optimise its information processing, possibly obtain as much relevant information as possible for the cheapest computational cost, then what behaviour would naturally follow from that? Can the development of social interaction or collective phenomena be motivated by an informational gradient? Furthermore, evolution itself can be seen as a process in which an agent population obtains information from the environment, which begs the question of how this can be quantified, and how systems would adapt to maximise this information?

The common theme in those different scenarios is the identification and quantification of driving forces behind evolution, learning, behaviour and other crucial processes of life, in the hope that the implementation or optimisation of these measurements will allow us to construct life-like systems.

Details for submissions, acceptances, potential talks, and dates can be found via Nihat Ay’s Research Group on Information Theory of Cognitive Systems. For more information on how to register, please visit the ALife 2014 homepage. If there are any questions, or if you just want to indicate interest in submitting or attending, please feel free to mail them at itialife@gmail.com.

According to their release, the open access journal Entropy will sponsor the workshop by an open call with a special issue on the topic of the workshop. More details will be announced to emails received via itialife@gmail.com and over the alife and connectionists mailing lists.