Abstract
An emergent property of a system is a property of the system that is not possessed by any of its components. In this paper, we examine some emergent properties of teams of agents in the Tileworld which arise from agents communicating their intentions to other agents on the same team. As expected, teams of communicating agents outperform noncommunicating agents, and teams with two-way communication abilities outperform teams where a transaction consists of a single message only. The surprising result was that, up to a certain limit, as the size of the team increased, the individual performance of the team members actually increased, even though there were more agents in competition for the resource. This is because the increased rate of replenishment of resources due to other agents' consumption more than compensates an agent for the negative effects of competition. This property depends on the effect of communication in causing the agents to spread out and avoid interfering with one another. We give a partial explanation for this phenomenon. We also investigate the effectiveness of communication between agents, and show that the utility of communication varies logarithmically with the range of communication.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Clark, M., Irwig, K., Wobcke, W. (1997). Emergent properties of teams of agents in the Tileworld. In: Cavedon, L., Rao, A., Wobcke, W. (eds) Intelligent Agent Systems Theoretical and Practical Issues. IAS 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1209. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62686-7_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62686-7_35
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