European Conference on Artificial Life

Title

Quantifying Morphological Computation based on an information decomposition of the sensorimotor loop

Authors

• Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi
• Johannes Rauh

Presentation Schedule

• Talk Time: 14:50
• Date: Thursday 23 July
• Session: Special Session – Quantifying Embodiment RCH/250 Thursday 23 July 14:00

Full Paper Download

Download via this paper's page on the MIT Press ECAL 2015 Proceedings website.

Abstract

The question of how an agent is affected by its embodiment has attracted growing attention in recent years. A new field of artificial intelligence has emerged, which is based on the idea that intelligence cannot be understood without taking the embodiment into account. The contribution of an agent’s embodiment to its behaviour is also known as morphological computation. In this work, we propose a quantification of morphological computation, which is based on an information decomposition of the sensorimotor loop into shared, unique and synergistic information. Using a simple model of the sensorimotor loop, we show that the unique information of the body with respect to the environment is a good measure for morphological computation.