Connectionists: Paper: Towards Closed Loop Information

[Bernd Porr]

I'm pleased to inform you that a paper about closed loop information is 
available online:

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/1.2/

in the journal

Constructivist Foundations:

Towards Closed Loop Information: Predictive Information

     Bernd Porr, Alice Egerton and Florentin Wörgötter

Motivation: Classical definitions of information, such as the Shannon 
information, are designed for open loop systems because they define 
information on a channel which has an input and an output. The main 
motivation of this paper is to present a closed loop information measure 
which is compatible with constructivist thinking. Design: Our 
information measure for a closed loop system reflects how additional 
sensor inputs are utilised to establish additional sensor-motor loops 
during learning. Our information measure is based on the assumption that 
it is not optimal to stay reactive and that it is beneficial to become 
proactive through increased learning about the environment. Consequently 
our information measure gauges the utilisation of new sensor inputs to 
generate anticipatory actions. We call this information measure 
"predictive information" (PI). Findings: Our PI is zero if the organism 
uses only its reflex reactions. It grows when the organism is able to 
use other sensor inputs to preempt reflex reactions and is able to 
replace reflexes by anticipatory reactions. This has been demonstrated 
with a real robot that had to learn to avoid obstacles. Conclusion: PI 
is a new measure which is able to quantify anticipatory learning and, in 
contrast to the Shannon information, is calculated only at the inputs of 
an agent. This information measure has been successfully applied to a 
simple robot task but its application is neither limited to a certain 
task nor to a certain learning rule.
Keywords: Closed loop system, information measure, differential Hebbian 
learning, reactive vs proactive systems
.
About the journal:

Constructivist Foundations (CF) is an independent academic peer-reviewed 
e-journal without commercial interests. Its aim is to promote scientific 
foundations and applications of constructivist sciences, to weed out 
pseudoscientific claims and to base constructivist sciences on sound 
scientific foundations, which do not equal the scientific method with 
objectivist claims. The journal is concerned with the interdisciplinary 
study of all forms of constructivist sciences, especially radical 
constructivism, cybersemiotics, enactive cognitive science, epistemic 
structuring of experience, second order cybernetics, the theory of 
autopoietic systems, etc.

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Apologies for mutiple postings.

Regards
/Bernd Porr
-- 
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