Complex Insight - Understanding our world

ECAL 2013, the twelfth European Conference on Artificial Life, presents the current state of the art of a mature and autonomous discipline collocated at the intersection of a theoretical perspective (the scientific explanations of different levels of life organizations, e.g., molecules, compartments, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, collective and social phenomena) and advanced technological applications (bio-inspired algorithms and techniques to building-up concrete solutions such as in robotics, data analysis, search engines, gaming).

Advances in Artificial Life, ECAL 2013

Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems

Edited by Pietro Liò, Orazio Miglino, Giuseppe Nicosia, Stefano Nolfi and Mario Pavone

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/advances-artificial-life-ecal-2013

Accessing information efficiently is vital for animals to make the optimal decisions, and it is particularly important when they are facing predators. Yet until now, very few quantitative conclusions have been drawn about the information dynamics in the interaction between animals due to the lack of appropriate theoretic measures. Here, we employ transfer entropy (TE), a new information-theoretic and model-free measure, to explore the information dynamics in the interaction between a predator and a prey fish. We conduct experiments in which a predator and a prey fish are confined in separate parts of an arena, but can communicate with each other visually and tactilely. TE is calculated on the pair’s coarse-grained state of the trajectories. We find that the prey’s TE is generally significantly bigger than the predator’s during trials, which indicates that the dominant information is transmitted from predator to prey. We then demonstrate that the direction of information flow is irrelevant to the parameters used in the coarse-grained procedures. We further calculate the prey’s TE at different distances between it and the predator. The resulted figure shows that there is a high plateau in the mid-range of the distance and that drops quickly at both the near and the far ends. This result reflects that there is a sensitive space zone where the prey is highly vigilant of the predator’s position.

Information Dynamics in the Interaction between a Prey and a Predator Fish
Feng Hu, Li-Juan Nie and Shi-Jian Fu

Entropy 2015, 17(10), 7230-7241; http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e17107230 ;