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All Else Being Equal Be Empowered

  • Conference paper

Abstract

The classical approach to using utility functions suffers from the drawback of having to design and tweak the functions on a case by case basis. Inspired by examples from the animal kingdom, social sciences and games we propose empowerment, a rather universal function, defined as the information-theoretic capacity of an agent’s actuation channel. The concept applies to any sensorimotoric apparatus. Empowerment as a measure reflects the properties of the apparatus as long as they are observable due to the coupling of sensors and actuators via the environment.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Adaptive Systems Research Group, School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield Herts, AL10 9AB, UK

    Alexander S. Klyubin, Daniel Polani & Chrystopher L. Nehaniv

Authors
  1. Alexander S. Klyubin
  2. Daniel Polani
  3. Chrystopher L. Nehaniv

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Computation Group, University of Kent, CT2 7NF, Canterbury, UK

    Mathieu S. Capcarrère

  2. Computing Laboratory and Centre for BioMedical Informatics, University of Kent, CT2 7NF, Canterbury, UK

    Alex A. Freitas

  3. Computer Science Department, University College London, London, UK

    Peter J. Bentley

  4. Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Colin G. Johnson

  5. Department of Electronics, University of York, YO10 5DD, Heslington, York, UK

    Jon Timmis

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Cite this paper

Klyubin, A.S., Polani, D., Nehaniv, C.L. (2005). All Else Being Equal Be Empowered. In: Capcarrère, M.S., Freitas, A.A., Bentley, P.J., Johnson, C.G., Timmis, J. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3630. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11553090_75

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