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GSO-2011: Sander van Dijk
Goal information parsimony gives rise to subgoals, least-commitment and hidden intentions The relevant information formalism has been shown to successfully guide the self-organization of strategies, by finding an optimal trade-off between a strategy's utility and informational parsimony (Polani 2006). This talk will discuss a recent extension of this formalism to goal-oriented behaviour and will present the notion of relevant goal information as the amount of information an agent necessarily has to maintain on average about its current goal to achieve it. Starting from the hypothesis that organisms use information economically, the structure of this information is studied, and how goal-information parsimony can guide the organization of behaviour. It is shown how additional parsimony trade-offs arise when sensory and goal information are combined, and, moreover, how these methods lead to a general definition and quantification of sub-goals. Dual viewpoints give rise to interesting behavioural properties emerging from goal information parsinomy; firstly, an agent-internal view shows that it naturally leads to least-commitment policies, connecting the relevant information formalism to empowerment. An external, 'digested information' type (Salge & Polani 2011) viewpoint shows that an agent minimising the active use of goal information also reveals as little about its current goal as possible, and thus shows the potential of these methods to study goal-concealment and 'intention'. Finally, this latter viewpoint leads to the development of a local, on-line method for sub-goal based global task decomposition. |