A Theory of Cheap Control in Embodied Systems
Fig 3
Ambiguity and redundancy of the sensor measurement.
In this example, an agent navigates the 20 × 20 maze shown in the left panel. The agent is endowed with two sensors (eyes), Sleft and Sright. Each sensor measures a weighted average of the walls in the immediate vicinity, illustrated in the central panel, and outputs one of 8 possible numerical values, as shown in the right panel. There are 400 possible locations in the maze but only 8 × 8 = 64 joint sensor states. This implies that the sensor measurement is highly ambiguous about the world state. Furthermore, the outputs of both sensors are not independent; they always have the same value at the decimal place. Due to this redundancy, the factual number of joint sensor states is 15, instead of 64.