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Semantic Information as a Measure of Synthetic Cells’ Knowledge of the Environment

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Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation (WIVACE 2023)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1977))

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Abstract

The concept of semantic information refers to the type of information that has some “significance” or “meaning” for a given system. Its use to describe how precisely the desired meaning is conveyed makes possible to characterize systems in terms of autonomous agents that are able to achieve an intrinsic goal or to accomplish a specific task. Two different types of semantic information are well recognized and used in the literature: i. ‘stored’ semantic information, which refers to information exchanged between a system and its environment in its initial distribution, and ii. ‘observed’ semantic information, which denotes the information that is dynamically acquired by a system to maintain its own existence. Both the concepts of stored and observed semantic information were first introduced by Kolchinsky and Wolpert in 2018.

In this paper we present an approach to measure observed semantic information. Its quantitative measure is obtained for a smart drug delivery scenario where synthetic cells sense an environment made up of cancerous cells. These release a signal molecule that triggers the production of a cytotoxic drug by the synthetic cell. For the same scenario, the stored semantic information has already been computed. The main novel contribution compared to the evaluation of stored semantic information consists in a measure of the minimal perception of the environment [in bits] that allows a system to maintain its own functionality (as a proxy of its own existence) during its joint dynamic evolution with the environment, i.e. not decreasing its viability compared to full environment perception. Moreover, we provide a preliminary discussion about how the quantification of semantic information can contribute to better define what is meaningful to an agent. With this result we emphasize once again the role that “synthetic cells” have as new (bio)technological platform for theoretical and applied investigations of semantic information in biological systems.

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Acknowledgements

Part of this research has been carried out within the PRIN-2022 funding program, supported by the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca (MUR), grant number 20222HHXAX, “Org(SB-EAI) – An Organizational Approach to the Synthetic Modeling of Cognition based on Synthetic Biology and Embodied AI”. The synthetic cell model on observed semantic information have been also presented, as a poster [6], at the NANOCOM 2023 conference (20–22 September 2023, Coventry, United Kingdom).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB), Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Lorenzo Del Moro & Maurizio Magarini

  2. Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies (DiSTeBA), University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Pasquale Stano

Authors
  1. Lorenzo Del Moro
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  2. Maurizio Magarini
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  3. Pasquale Stano
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Correspondence to Maurizio Magarini or Pasquale Stano .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Marco Villani

  2. University of Parma, Parma, Italy

    Stefano Cagnoni

  3. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Roberto Serra

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Del Moro, L., Magarini, M., Stano, P. (2024). Semantic Information as a Measure of Synthetic Cells’ Knowledge of the Environment. In: Villani, M., Cagnoni, S., Serra, R. (eds) Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation. WIVACE 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1977. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57430-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57430-6_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-57429-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-57430-6

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