Valency as a Mechanism for Agent Adaptation

This paper introduces valency as an adaptive mechanism. It has been previously hypothesised that valency assesses the agent’s behavioural patterns and guides adaptation. However, we argue that it acts furthermore as a mechanism guiding the interaction between learning and evolution. Unlike previous studies, we hypothesise that behaviour related information must be underspecified in the genes and that the resulting behavioural patterns are further specified via developmental learning. This hypothesis has been extensively tested in a set of static and dynamic scenarios, aiming to demonstrate the necessity of valency and of both learning and evolution as complementary processes for adapting to the environment.