Intelligence, a recipe

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• Prof. Matthew Turner, Warwick
• Tuesday 09 October 2018, 13:00-14:00
• MR11, CMS.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Professor Mike Cates.

We study motile agents that both sense, and then seek future control over, their environment. They do this by a process that we call future state maximisation (FSM): they each choose a move in the present that leads to the largest variety of states that they can realise in (their model of) the future. I will first discuss how this may relate to intelligent behaviour more generally. We then focus on groups of moving, re-orientable agents that individually maximise the variety of a simple visual encoding of the environment accessible to them within some time horizon. Collective motion emerges that exhibits cohesion, co-alignment and collision suppression; none of which are explicitly encoded in the model. Crudely put: maximisation of the “entropy” of future states naturally leads to a low entropy (cohesive, co-aligned) state in the present; time reversal symmetry is only broken weakly, if at all. I show how heuristics mimicking FSM could operate in real time under animal cognition. These offer a philosophically attractive, bottom-up mechanism for the emergence of swarming behaviour in animals. Perhaps, one day, we might also see them encoded into artificial “intelligent” matter, able to sense light, process information and move.

This talk is part of the DAMTP Statistical Physics and Soft Matter Seminar series.

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• DAMTP Statistical Physics and Soft Matter Seminar
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