Abstract
In this paper we present the Behaviosite paradigm, a new approach to affecting the behavior of distributed agents in a multiagent system, which is inspired by biological parasites with behavior manipulation properties. Behaviosites are special kinds of agents that “infect” a system composed of agents operating in that environment. The behaviosites facilitate behavioral changes in agents to achieve altered, potentially improved, performance of the overall system. Behaviosites need to be designed so that they are intimately familiar with the internal workings of the environment and of the agents operating within it, and behaviosites apply this knowledge for their manipulation, using various infection and manipulation strategies.
To demonstrate and test this paradigm, we implemented a version of the El Farol problem, where agents want to go to a bar of limited capacity, and cannot use communication to coordinate their activity. Several solutions to this problem exist, but most yield near-zero utility for the agents. We added behaviosites to the El Farol problem, which manipulate the decision making process of some of the agents by making them believe that bar capacity is lower than it really is. We show that behaviosites overcome the learning ability of the agents, and increase social utility and social fairness significantly, with little actual damage to the overall system, and none to the agents.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Vincent, J.F.V., Mann, D.L.: Systematic technology transfer from biology to engineering. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A 360(1791), 159–174 (2002)
Menciassi, A., Dario, P.: Bio-inspired solutions for locomotion in the gastrointestinal tract: background and perspectives. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A 361(1811), 2287–2298 (2003)
Miller, J.H.: The critic as host. Critical Inquiry 3(3), 439–447 (1977)
Nickles, M., Rovatsos, M., Weiss, G.: Post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Computational Autonomy — Potential, Risks, Solutions. In: Nickles, M., Rovatsos, M., Weiss, G. (eds.) Agents and Computational Autonomy. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2969, Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Scerri, P., Pynadath, D.V., Tambe, M.: Towards adjustable autonomy for the real world. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 17, 171–228 (2002)
Arthur, W.B.: Inductive reasoning and bounded rationality (the El Farol problem). Amer. Econ. Review 84(406) (1994)
Greenwald, A., Farago, J., Hall, K.: Fair and Efficient Solutions to the Santa Fe Bar Problem. In: Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (2002)
Weiss, G.: Multiagent systems: A modern introduction to distributed artificial intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Franklin, S., Graesser, A. (eds.) Is it an agent, or just a program?: A taxonomy for autonomous agents. In: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (1996)
Brooks, R.A.: Intelligence without reason. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Sydney, Australia, pp. 569–595 (1991)
Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., Vlissides, J.: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. In: Professional Computing Series, Addison-Wesley, London (1994)
Greenwald, A., Mishra, B., Parikh, R.: The Santa Fe Bar problem revisited: Theoretical and practical implications. Festival on Game Theory: Interactive Dynamics and Learning. SUNY, Stony Brook (1998)
Moro, E.: The minority game: an introductory guide. Advances in Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics (2004)
Edmunds, B.: Gossip, sexual recombination and the El Farol Bar: Modelling the emergence of heterogenety. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (1999)
Bell, A.M., Sethares, W.A.: The El Farol problem and the internet: Congestion and coordination failure. Computing in Economics and Finance 1999 812, Society for Computational Economics (1999)
Poulin, R.: Evolutionary Ecology of Parasites — From individuals to communities. Springer, Berlin (1997)
Muller, C.B., Schmid-Hempel, P.: Exploitation of cold temperature as defense against parasitoids in bumblebees. Nature 363, 65–67 (1993)
Ray, T.: Tierra (1990), http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/tierra
Hillis, W.D.: Co-evolving parasites improve simulated evolution as an optimization procedure. Artificial Life II (1992)
Mamei, M., Roli, A., Zambonelli, F.: Emergence and control of macro-spatial structures in perturbed cellular automata, and implications for pervasive computing systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans 35(3), 337–348 (2005)
Brooks, R.A.: Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47, 139–159 (1991)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Shabtay, A., Rabinovich, Z., Rosenschein, J.S. (2007). Behaviosites: A Novel Paradigm for Affecting Distributed Behavior. In: Brueckner, S.A., Hassas, S., Jelasity, M., Yamins, D. (eds) Engineering Self-Organising Systems. ESOA 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4335. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69868-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69868-5_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69867-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69868-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)