Information-theoretic fitness functions are becoming increasingly popular to produce generally useful, task-independent behaviors. One such universal function, dubbed empowerment, measures the amount of control an agent exerts on its environment via its sensorimotor system. Specifically, empowerment attempts to maximize the mutual information between an agent's actions and its received sensor states at a later point in time. Traditionally, empowerment has been applied to a conventional sensorimotor apparatus, such as a robot. Here, we expand the approach to a distributed, multi-agent sensorimotor system embodied by a neural cellular automaton (NCA). We show that the addition of empowerment as a secondary objective in the evolution of NCA to perform the task of morphogenesis, growing and maintaining a pre-specified shape, results in higher fitness compared to evolving for morphogenesis alone. Results suggest there may be a synergistic relationship between morphogenesis and empowerment. That is, indirectly selecting for coordination between neighboring cells over the duration of development is beneficial to the developmental process itself. Such a finding may have applications in developmental biology by providing potential mechanisms of communication between cells during growth from a single cell to a multicellular, target morphology. Source code for the experiments in this paper can be found at: \url{https://github.com/caitlingrasso/empowered-nca}.

该研究介绍了信息理论适应度函数，其中一种普适函数 empowerment 可以衡量代理通过其感知—运动系统对环境的控制量，该实验将 empowerment 作为第二目标添加到神经元元胞自动机发育中，结果表明发育过程中邻近细胞之间的协同作用对整个发育过程有益，并提供了单细胞转变为多细胞目标形态期间的潜在细胞间通信机制。

强化神经元胞自动机