Journal
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
Volume 5, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.172221
Keywords
complexity; emergence; computation; evolution; predictability
Categories
Funding
- Botin Foundation
- Banco Santander through its Santander Universities Global Division
- Santa Fe Institute
- Secretaria d'Universitats i Recerca del Departament d'Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya
- European Research Council [ERC SYNCOM 294294]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the inevitable cost associated with detecting environmental cues and responding to them in adaptive ways, we conjecture that the potential for predicting the environment can overcome the expenses associated with maintaining costly, complex structures. We present a minimal formal model grounded in information theory and selection, in which successive generations of agents are mapped into transmitters and receivers of a coded message. Our agents are guessing machines and their capacity to deal with environments of different complexity defines the conditions to sustain more complex agents.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available