Abstract
Animal movement encodes information that is meaningfully interpreted by natural counterparts. This is a behavior that roboticists are trying to replicate in artificial systems but that is not well understood even in natural systems. This paper presents a count on the cardinality of a discretized posture space—an aspect of expressivity—of articulated platforms. The paper uses an information-theoretic measure, Shannon entropy, to create observations analogous to Moore’s Law, providing a measure that complements traditional measures of the capacity of robots. This analysis, applied to a variety of natural and artificial systems, shows trends in increasing capacity in both internal and external complexity for natural systems while artificial, robotic systems have increased significantly in the capacity of computational (internal) states but remained more or less constant in mechanical (external) state capacity. The quantitative measure proposed in this paper provides an additional lens through which to compare natural and artificial systems.
Highlights
Moving bodies seem to express information: animals, including humans, communicate through non-verbal, visual cues
This paper provides a quantitative measure that may explain this observation and may help understand a key difference between natural and current artificial systems
The measure and procedure presented in the previous section can categorize and compare artificial systems
Summary
Moving bodies seem to express information: animals, including humans, communicate through non-verbal, visual cues. A nervous twitch of the eye, slight straightening of the spine, or subtle quickening of breath of a poker player may involuntarily occur because they have just drawn a fortuitous card, reflecting a change of their internal estimate of their likelihood to win the hand. Another player may, having watched this opponent over the course of several hands, recognize this “tell” and adjust their own strategy . Inside the context of a poker game, these changes in external presentation have meaning
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