Related papers: The evolution of lossy compression
For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to…
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…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
Many complex networks depend upon biological entities for their preservation. Such entities, from human cognition to evolution, must first encode and then replicate those networks under marked resource constraints. Networks that survive are…
Organisms have to keep track of the information in the environment that is relevant for adaptive behaviour. Transmitting information in an economical and efficient way becomes crucial for limited-resourced agents living in high-dimensional…
The existing concept of the "fitness value of information" provides a theoretical upper bound on the fitness advantage of using information concerning a fluctuating environment. Using concepts from rate-distortion theory, we develop a…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
A distinctive property of human and animal intelligence is the ability to form abstractions by neglecting irrelevant information which allows to separate structure from noise. From an information theoretic point of view abstractions are…
In a constantly changing world, animals must account for environmental volatility when making decisions. To appropriately discount older, irrelevant information, they need to learn the rate at which the environment changes. We develop an…
The vertebrate motor system employs dimensionality-reducing strategies to limit the complexity of movement coordination, for efficient motor control. But when environments are dense with hidden action-outcome contingencies, movement…
A common assumption in evolutionary thought is that adaptation drives an increase in biological complexity. However, the rules governing evolution of complexity appear more nuanced. Evolution is deeply connected to learning, where…
Expression level is known to be a strong determinant of a protein's rate of evolution. But the converse can also be true: evolutionary dynamics can affect expression levels of proteins. Having implications in both directions fosters the…
Biological organisms are open, adaptve systems that can respond to changes in environment in specific ways. Adaptation and response can be posed as an optimization problem, with a tradeoff between the benefit obtained from a response and…
We show how rate-distortion theory provides a mechanism for automated theory building by naturally distinguishing between regularity and randomness. We start from the simple principle that model variables should, as much as possible, render…
Foundation models excel in stable environments, yet often fail where reliability matters most: medicine, finance, and policy. This Fidelity Paradox is not just a data problem; it is structural. In domains where rules change over time, extra…
In varying environments it is beneficial for organisms to utilize available cues to infer the conditions they may encounter and express potentially favorable traits. However, external cues can be unreliable or too costly to use. We consider…
As part of a generalized "prisoners' dilemma", is considered that the evolution of a population with a full set of behavioral strategies limited only by the depth of memory. Each subsequent generation of the population successively loses…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…
Much of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms derives from analysis of low-dimensional models: with few interacting species, or few axes defining "fitness". It is not always clear to what extent the intuition derived…