On Role of Implicit Interaction and Explicit Communications in Emergence of Social Behavior in Continuous Predators-Prey Pursuit Problem

Abstract

We present the result of our work on use of genetic programming for evolving social behavior of agents situated in inherently cooperative environment. We use predators-prey pursuit problem to verify our hypothesis that relatively complex social behavior may emerge from simple, implicit, locally defined, and therefore — robust and highly-scalable interactions between the predator agents. We propose a proximity perception model for the predator agents where only the relative bearings and the distances to the closest predator agent and to the prey are perceived. The instance of the problem we consider is more realistic than commonly discussed in that the world, the sensory and moving abilities of agents are continuous; and the sensors of agents feature limited range of “visibility”. The results show that surrounding behavior, evolved using proposed strongly typed genetic programming with exception handling (STGPE) emerges from local, implicit and proximity-defined interactions between the predator agents in both cases when multi-agents systems comprises (i) partially inferior predator agents (with inferior moving abilities and superior sensory abilities) and with (ii) completely inferior predator agents. In the latter case the introduction of short-term memory and explicit communication contributes to the improvement of performance of STGPE.