intrinsically conservative. But to maximally benefit from affordances, the agent needs
to actively seek such affordances. This requires an intervention that is directed not at
suppressing diversions, but in a sense at precipitating them—in the hope that one of
them turns out to be positive. This process of eliciting diversions may be called
exploration. Exploration means venturing into the unknown with the intention of
discovering new information, resources, opportunities, or—most generally—
affordances. It implies a course of action that is moving away from what is
foreseeable (what we will later call “prospect”), and towards what is not (what we
will call “mystery”). The main rationale for moving away from the known is that the
affordances it offers are less attractive than those that might be expected from the
unknown. In other words, however rich or poor the known affordances may be, the
agent will tend to leave them behind if it suspects that it “can do better” elsewhere.
Examples of exploration are animals foraging for food [Kramer & Weary,
1991], plants releasing their seeds to the wind in the hope that some of them land on
fertile ground, children playing, scientists or artists performing experiments, and—of
course—travelers exploring new territories. In our highly regulated industrial or
agricultural societies exploration may seem like a rather extraordinary activity that is
reserved for creative artists, inventors or adventurers. However, it is actually the
default type of behavior for most animals and hunter-gatherers. Indeed, in natural
circumstances food is typically scarce and its location uncertain, and therefore on-
going exploration is needed to find it. If food were predictably and abundantly present
at a certain location, a growing number of competing organisms would gather there to
consume it, until the food would be exhausted. This would force them all to find a
new source—one that is preferably as yet unknown to their competitors. That is why
it is advantageous for agents to be as diverse and unpredictable as possible in their
exploration strategies.
While regulation is the straightforward method to deal with disturbances,
affordances call for either exploration or exploitation. Exploitation means making use
of already known affordances in order to maximally extract benefit. Exploration
means searching for hitherto unknown affordances. Neither approach is sufficient on
its own. Exploitation is in general more efficient and less risky than exploration, since
the agent does not lose time, energy or possibly life in failed ventures. Yet, as we
noted, exploited resources tend to get exhausted and need to be renewed. Moreover,
newly discovered resources may turn out to be much richer than the ones already
known. Therefore, agents that stick to the known will sooner or later be outcompeted
by those that dare to look further, and thus discover more powerful affordances.
The best strategy therefore is a mix of exploitation and exploration. The
difficult choice about how much effort to invest in each alternative is known as the
exploitation-exploration trade-off [March, 1991; Cohen et al., 2007]. While there does
not seem to be an optimal strategy for making this decision, a general rule-of-thumb
could be the following: the more variable or unstable the affordances—i.e. the higher
the probability that known affordances would vanish or that novel affordances would
appear—, the more exploration is likely to be beneficial.
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