Organization of the information flow in the perception-action loop of evolved agents

Sensor evolution in nature aims at improving the acquisition of information from the environment and is intimately related with selection pressure towards adaptivity and robustness. Recent work in the area aims at studying the perception-action loop in a formalized information-theoretic manner. This paves the way towards a principled and general understanding of the mechanisms guiding the evolution of sensors in nature and provides insights into the design of mechanisms of artificial sensor evolution. In our paper we study the perception-action loop of agents. We evolve finite-state automata as agent controllers to solve an information acquisition task in a simple virtual world and study how the information flow is organized by evolution. Our analysis of the evolved automata and the information flow provides insight into how evolution organizes sensoric information acquisition, memory, processing and action selection. In addition, the results are compared to ideal information extraction schemes following from the Information Bottleneck principle.