Research report 2009 - Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

Autonomy: an information theoretic perspective

Authors
Bertschinger, Nils
Departments
Summary
Many living systems can survive thanks to sophisticated and flexible information processing capabilities enabling them to act autonomously. Even though this ability is increasingly demanded from technical systems, it is still largely unknown which properties are required for a system to obtain autonomy. To fill this gap, an information theoretic measure of autonomy is proposed here. For illustration the autonomy of simple systems is measured and a close relationship between autonomy and memory is established.

For the full text, see the German version.

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