(black) hat tip to johnswentworth for the notion that the choice of boundary for the agent is arbitrary in the sense that you can think of a thermostat optimizing the environment or think of the environment as optimizing the thermostat. Collapsing sensor/control duality for at least some types of feedback circuits.
These sorts of problems are what caused me to want a presentation which didn’t assume well-defined agents and boundaries in the ontology, but I’m not sure how it applies to the above—I am not looking for optimization as a behavioral pattern but as a concrete type of computation, which involves storing world-models and goals and doing active search for actions which further the goals. Neither a thermostat nor the world outside seem to do this from what I can see? I think I’m likely missing your point.
Motivating example: consider a primitive bacterium with a thermostat, a light sensor, and a salinity detector, each of which has functional mappings to some movement pattern. You could say this system has a 3 dimensional map and appears to search over it.
(black) hat tip to johnswentworth for the notion that the choice of boundary for the agent is arbitrary in the sense that you can think of a thermostat optimizing the environment or think of the environment as optimizing the thermostat. Collapsing sensor/control duality for at least some types of feedback circuits.
These sorts of problems are what caused me to want a presentation which didn’t assume well-defined agents and boundaries in the ontology, but I’m not sure how it applies to the above—I am not looking for optimization as a behavioral pattern but as a concrete type of computation, which involves storing world-models and goals and doing active search for actions which further the goals. Neither a thermostat nor the world outside seem to do this from what I can see? I think I’m likely missing your point.
Motivating example: consider a primitive bacterium with a thermostat, a light sensor, and a salinity detector, each of which has functional mappings to some movement pattern. You could say this system has a 3 dimensional map and appears to search over it.