Title
Criticality as It Could Be: organizational invariance as self-organized criticality in embodied agents
Authors
Miguel Aguilera, Manuel Bedia
Schedule
Date: Tuesday 5 Sept
Talk Time: TBA
Session: Complex dynamical systems 10:30
Keywords
criticality, organizational invariance, universality, self-organized criticality, adaptive behaviour, embodied agents
Abstract
This paper outlines a methodological approach to generate adaptive agents driving themselves near points of criticality. Using a synthetic approach we construct a conceptual model that, instead of specifying mechanistic requirements to generate criticality, exploits the maintenance of an organizational structure capable of reproducing critical behavior. Our approach captures the well-known principle of universality that classifies critical phenomena inside a few universality classes of systems without relying on specific mechanisms or topologies. In particular, we implement an artificial embodied agent controlled by a neural network maintaining a correlation structure randomly sampled form a lattice Ising model at a critical point. We evaluate the agent in two classical reinforcement learning scenarios: the Mountain Car benchmark and the Acrobot double pendulum, finding that in both cases the neural controller reaches a point of criticality, which coincides with a transition point between two regimes of the agent’s behaviour, maximizing the synergistic information between hidden neurons and sensorimotor patterns. Finally, we discuss the possible applications of this synthetic approach to the comprehension of deeper principles connected to the pervasive presence of criticality in biological and cognitive systems.
