Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Robotic swarms offer flexibility, robustness, and scalability. For successful operation they need appropriate communication strategies that should be dynamically adaptable to possibly changing environmental requirements. In this paper we try to achieve this through evolving communication on-the-fly. As a test case we use a scenario where robots need to cooperate to gather energy and the necessity to cooperate is scalable. We implement an evolutionary algorithm that works during the actual operation of the robots (on-line), where evolutionary operators are performed by the robots themselves (on-board) and robots exchange genomes with other robots for reproduction (distributed). We perform experiments with different cooperation pressures and observe that communication strategies can be successfully adapted to the particular demands of the environment.

The main contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it presents a new software system for empirical investigations of evolving agent societies in SugarScape like environments. Second, it introduces a conceptual framework for modeling cooperation in an artificial society. In this framework the environmental pressure to cooperate is controllable by a single parameter, thus allowing systematic investigations of system behavior under varying circumstances. Third, it reports upon results from experiments that implemented and tested environments based upon this new model of cooperation. The results show that the pressure to cooperate leads to the evolution of communication skills facilitating cooperation. Furthermore, higher levels of cooperation pressure lead to the emergence of increased communication.

The main contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it presents a new system for empirical investigations of evolving agent societies in SugarScapelike environments, which improves existing Sugarscape testbeds. Secondly, we introduce a framework for modelling communication and cooperation in an animal society. In this framework the environmental pressure to communicate and cooperate is controllable by a single parameter. We perform several experiments with different values for this parameter and observe some surprising outcomes.