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Emergent discreteness in optimal behavior

ORAL

Abstract

Many organisms discretize their space of behaviors, in the extreme case making all-or-nothing choices in response to continuous signals. Is this driven by balancing costs related to the number of potential actions with the benefits of more accurate response? We explore when such discretization is instead optimal for responding to weak noisy signals, connecting to emergent simplicity from information theory.

Presenters

  • Michael C Abbott

    Yale University

Authors

  • Michael C Abbott

    Yale University

  • Benjamin B Machta

    Yale University