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LIT-1951: Keep Your Options Open: An Information-Based Driving Principle for Sensorimotor Systems

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1514), from the PLoS ONE version of record; worth reading for contextual empowerment, ordered by what the agent can read, and for the cart-pole, where greedy empowerment maximization balances the pole though the most empowered states are unreachable, a case of CLAIM-354's distinction between reach and what can be sustained.
Version2
Tagsinformation-theory, agency, anthology-candidate
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1514 — Klyubin, Polani & Nehaniv — Keep your options open
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1336 — In a cart-pole whose only given utility is 10-step empowerment, a controller that greedily picks the action leading to the more empowered successor balances the pole upright, though the states of highest empowerment lie off-centre and cannot be reached or sustained under the agent's own dynamics; what the agent can keep is not where empowerment is highest, THEORY-1344 — Empowerment is the channel capacity from an agent's next n actions to its sensor n steps later, an open-loop, interventional measure of how many perceptibly different futures the agent can bring about, which counts no control the agent cannot perceive; given side information about the channel's state it is never lower, so it is ordered by what the agent can read, from full state through its own sensor history to none

Graph View

Klyubin, A. S., Polani, D., Nehaniv, C. L. (2008). Keep Your Options Open: An Information-Based Driving Principle for Sensorimotor Systems. PLoS ONE, 3(12), e4018. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004018.

Read in full on 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1514; THEORY-1344, THEORY-1336).

Key takeaways

  • Contextual empowerment ≥ context-free (eq. 3): state ≥ own history ≥ bounded automaton ≥ none.
  • Cart-pole: the empowerment maxima are off-centre and unreachable; greedy maximization still balances the pole (pp. 4–7).
  • The horizon is “the main free variable” (p. 12).

Standing in the record

Empowerment as channel capacity from actions to later sensor states, which A21 reads as controllability and observability together. Bears on CLAIM-354.

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