Applied Mathematics Colloquium: Intrinsically motivated collective motion

Speaker:   Matthew Turner (University of Warwick)

Title:          Intrinsically motivated collective motion

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Abstract:

Understanding the collective motion of autonomous agents is now recognised as a seminal problem in non-equilibrium Physics with relevance to Robotics, Zoology etc.  We study information-processing agents that seek a form of control of their environment via future state maximisation (FSM), a principle that we argue may relate to intelligent behaviour more generally. 

We study moving, re-orientable agents that seek to maximise their space of accessible (visual) environments, out to some time horizon. The action of each agent is (re)established by exhaustive enumeration of its future decision tree at each time step - each agent chooses the branch of its tree leading from the present to the richest future state space. Cohesive swarm-like motion emerges that is similar to that observed in animal systems, such as bird flocks. We develop heuristics that mimic computationally intensive FSM but that could operate in real time under animal cognition. We show that iterative application of these heuristics as the model for the behaviour of others, when determining the dynamics of self, can lead to a form of closure for the problem. I will argue that this offers a philosophically attractive, bottom-up mechanism for the emergence of swarming.