Negative information

In robotics, Negative information is defined as the ascertained absence of evidence when evidence was expected. In quantum information science, Negative information is when sending quantum bits of a message from a transmitter to a receiver will reduce the information the receiver has about the message.

Evidence or observations fall into the following matrix:

Systems are commonly tuned such that only true positives are used. Information in the false row is not used.

Object Tracking
Not sensing an object which was expected to be within the sensing range.

Robot localization
A robot that expects to make a certain measurement but actually does not sense anything gains negative information. Since this information is usually not used by robots, they tend to repeatedly bump into things once they are lost.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)
Features that were found earlier but are missing in later sensor readings are deleted due to this negative information.

Quantum mechanics
In quantum mechanics, the Renninger negative-result experiment describes the seeming paradox of wave-function collapse when a particle is failed to be detected.