Integrated Information Increases with Fitness in the Evolution of Animats

Jeffrey A Edlund, Nicolas Chaumont, Arend Hintze, Christof Koch, Giulio Tononi and Christoph Adami

PLOS Computational Biology, 2011, vol. 7, issue 10, 1-13

Abstract: One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the functional complexity of an organism remains a challenging problem, in particular since organismal functional complexity is not well-defined. We present here several candidate measures that quantify information and integration, and study their dependence on fitness as an artificial agent (“animat”) evolves over thousands of generations to solve a navigation task in a simple, simulated environment. We compare the ability of these measures to predict high fitness with more conventional information-theoretic processing measures. As the animat adapts by increasing its “fit” to the world, information integration and processing increase commensurately along the evolutionary line of descent. We suggest that the correlation of fitness with information integration and with processing measures implies that high fitness requires both information processing as well as integration, but that information integration may be a better measure when the task requires memory. A correlation of measures of information integration (but also information processing) and fitness strongly suggests that these measures reflect the functional complexity of the animat, and that such measures can be used to quantify functional complexity even in the absence of fitness data. Author Summary: Intelligent behavior encompasses appropriate navigation in complex environments that is achieved through the integration of sensorial information and memory of past events to create purposeful movement. This behavior is often described as “complex”, but universal ways to quantify such a notion do not exist. Promising candidates for measures of functional complexity are based on information theory, but fail to take into account the important role that memory plays in complex navigation. Here, we study a different information-theoretic measure called “integrated information”, and investigate its ability to reflect the complexity of navigation that uses both sensory data and memory. We suggest that measures based on the integrated-information concept correlate better with fitness than other standard measures when memory evolves as a key element in navigation strategy, but perform as well as more standard information processing measures if the robots navigate using a purely reactive sensor-motor loop. We conclude that the integration of information that emanates from the sensorial data stream with some (short-term) memory of past events is crucial to complex and intelligent behavior and speculate that integrated information–to the extent that it can be measured and computed–might best reflect the complexity of animal behavior, including that of humans.

Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pcbi00:1002236

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002236

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