Impoverished empowerment: 'Meaningful' action sequence generation through bandwidth limitation

Abstract

Empowerment is a promising concept to begin explaining how some biological organisms may assign a priori value expectations to states in taskless scenarios. Standard empowerment samples the full richness of an environment and assumes it can be fully explored. This may be too aggressive an assumption; here we explore impoverished versions achieved by limiting the bandwidth of the empowerment generating action sequences. It turns out that limited richness of actions concentrate on the "most important" ones with the additional benefit that the empowerment horizon can be extended drastically into the future. This indicates a path towards and intrinsic preselection for preferred behaviour sequences and helps to suggest more biologically plausible approaches. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.