Changing the Environment based on Intrinsic

One of the remarkable feats of intelligent life is that it restructures the world it lives in for its own benefit. Beavers build dams for shelter and to produce better hunting grounds, bees build hives for shelter and storage, humans have transformed the world in a multitude of ways. Intelligence is not only the ability to produce the right reaction to a randomly changing environment, but is also about actively influencing the change in the environment, leaving artefacts and structures that provide benefits in the future. In this abstract, I want to explore if the framework of intrinsic motivation can help us understand and possibly reproduce this phenomenon. In particular, I will show some simple, exploratory results on how empowerment, as one example of intrinsic motivation, can produce structures in the environment of an agent. The basic idea behind intrinsic motivation is that an agent’s behaviour, or decision making, is not guided by some form of externally specified reward, but rather by the optimization of some agent-internal measurement, which then gives rise to complex and rich interactions with the world. A quantitativ