Supportive and antagonistic behaviour in distributed computational creativity via coupled empowerment maximisation

There has been a strong tendency in distributed computational creativity systems to embrace embodied and situated agents for their flexible and adaptive behaviour. Intrinsically motivated agents are particularly successful in this respect, because they do not rely on externally specified goals, and can thus react flexibly to changes in open-ended environments. While supportive and antagonistic behaviour is omnipresent when people interact in creative tasks, existing implementations cannot establish such behaviour without constraining their agents’ flexibility by means of explicitly specified interaction rules. More open approaches in contrast cannot guarantee that support or antagonistic behaviour ever comes about. We define the information-theoretic principle of coupled empowerment maximisation as an intrinsically motivated frame for supportive and antagonistic behaviour within which agents can interact with maximum flexibility. We provide an intuition and a formalisation for an arbitrary number of agents. We then draw on several case-studies of co-creative and social creativity systems to make detailed predictions of the potential effect the underlying empowerment maximisation principle might have on the behaviour of creative agents.