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Limits on information storage for skills and actions

Storage limits for innate skills

For each species, there is a limit on the information that can be encoded in the DNA. Of that information, only a proportion is used for encoding innate skills. In theory we should be able to calculate how many bits are available to pack in all the innate skills for a given individual of the species. Even through the content may differ slightly across the population, the total available is probably fairly constant. It seems likely that species with a larger overall DNA also allocate more space to innate skills.

I am trying to get a rough estimate on how many bit might be required to represent a skill. Almost all skills contain conditions, if only to specify when to invoke them. More complex skills, i.e. containing many conditions and alternate actions, will require more bits than simpler skills.

Precision limits for innate and learned skills

I am focused on skills that specify physical action involving the skeleton by managing joint rotations. Joint angle and time have to be specified to coordinate actions. To get fancier, with smoother motion, I could specify acceleration (force). All of these could be specified with more or less precision. Increased precision takes more bits. Since there are a lot of joint movements in all but the simplest actions, information requirements for each motion component add up.

Precision also affects the learning skill, since the action has to be captured by a description of the action with enough precision to allow this description to be converted into a skill.

Flow limits for actions

Actions are controlled with muscle-tension information. This information is updated in short time intervals. Increased precision requires a higher bandwidth for the neural information flowing to the muscles.

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