Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published October 2011 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Integrated Information Increases with Fitness in the Evolution of Animats

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.

Additional Information

© 2011 Edlund et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received March 8, 2011; Accepted September 3, 2011; Published October 20, 2011. Editor: Lyle J. Graham, Université Paris Descartes, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France. Funding: This work was funded in part by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, by the National Science Foundation's Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research grant FIBR-0527023, NSF's BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action under contract No. DBI-0939454, and by the WCU (World Class University) program through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (R31-10008). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We would like to thank David Balduzzi, Virgil Griffith, Nikhil J. Joshi, Sang Wan Lee, and Jory Schossau, and acknowledge detailed and insightful reviewer comments. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: JAE AH CK GT CA. Performed the experiments: JAE AH. Analyzed the data: JAE AH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: NC. Wrote the paper: JAE CK GT CA.

Attached Files

Published - Edlund2011p16552Plos_Comput_Biol.pdf

Supplemental Material - FigureS1.pdf

Supplemental Material - TextS1.pdf

Supplemental Material - TextS2.pdf

Supplemental Material - TextS3.pdf

Supplemental Material - VideoS1.mp4

Supplemental Material - VideoS2.mp4

Supplemental Material - VideoS3.mp4

Files

TextS2.pdf
Files (21.1 MB)
Name Size Download all
md5:3998a4bf353b59bb634fcb33f0a440d6
114.8 kB Preview Download
md5:1ddad1dd82c1e0b35f1f48aa6181f8d5
799.3 kB Preview Download
md5:b46ff081b1c776fb2da77834b5769ed6
5.8 MB Download
md5:733abc7b2ca53de6065d12230f1fda76
147.3 kB Preview Download
md5:b82c11e08a751ad70f5d135c9c892c98
133.2 kB Preview Download
md5:ba8238e33a93e8920daa6b96f4861170
92.6 kB Preview Download
md5:4556dcf73eafd6c6ba7ce37379d23ebc
6.4 MB Download
md5:5e287e831eb6b4d9c4fa9639463c00dc
7.7 MB Download

Additional details

Created:
September 14, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023