Zenith Grant Awardee
Thomas Elliott
Nanyang Technological University
Co-Investigators
Jayne Thompson, Centre for Quantum Technologies; Felix Binder, Nanyang Technological University
Project Title
The role of quantum effects in simplifying adaptive agents
Project Summary
Whether it's a predator tracking their next meal, or a seed waiting for the right conditions to blossom, the key to survival in nature lies in making appropriate decisions based on present stimuli and past experiences. All living things continuously monitor their environment, devoting resources to store and track relevant information so that they can anticipate how each of their actions might affect the future. Interactions between such agents drives an evolutionary arms race, where they must devote ever-increasing resources to survive in increasingly complex environments. Could the drive for survival motivate adaptive agents to harness quantum effects? In this project, we approach this question by interfacing elements of complexity and quantum science. The former allows us to identify the resource costs for agents to adapt to various complex environments, and the latter to reduce this cost below classical limits when such agents are capable of processing quantum information. Such discoveries can have profound consequences: they uncover the means for designing quantum machines that can adapt to and thrive in their environment, while simultaneously illustrating that evolutionary pressure may well favour life capable of quantum reasoning.
Technical Abstract
An agent is an entity that has the capacity to influence its environment. They can appear in many guises: a predator hunting in the wild; a car navigating through traffic; a seed looking to germinate. From an information-theoretic perspective, these situations are all described within a unified framework, input-output processes, where input data is transduced into an output sequence. An agent receives stimuli (inputs) in the form of observations, and based on these will execute a strategy of actions (outputs) in response. Effective strategies to execute in response to complex environments must themselves too be typically complex. This requires agents with the ability to adroitly anticipate and adapt to their surroundings to track large amounts of information. This drives an evolutionary pressure for agents to adopt structures that can efficiently compress the information their strategy must track. We ask whether this drive might motivate adaptive agents to harness quantum effects. This is motivated by previous work on memory-efficient quantum models of stochastic data sequences. Using a blend of tools from quantum and complexity science, we will determine the most efficient memory structures for classical agents, and corresponding structures for quantum agents that offer compression beyond classical limits.
QSpace Latest
PressRelease: Shining a light on the roots of plant “intelligence”
All living organisms emit a low level of light radiation, but the origin and function of these ‘biophotons’ are not yet fully understood. An international team of physicists, funded by the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, has proposed a new approach for investigating this phenomenon based on statistical analyses of this emission. Their aim is to test whether biophotons can play a role in the transport of information within and between living organisms, and whether monitoring biophotons could contribute to the development of medical techniques for the early diagnosis of various diseases. Their analyses of the measurements of the faint glow emitted by lentil seeds support models for the emergence of a kind of plant ‘intelligence,’ in which the biophotonic emission carries information and may thus be used by plants as a means to communicate. The team reported this and reviewed the history of biophotons in an article in the journal Applied Sciences in June 2024.