When ants play chess (Or can strategies emerge from tactical behaviours?)

Abstract

Because we think that plans or strategies are useful for coordinating multiple agents, and because we hypothesise that most of the plans we use are build partly by us and partly by our immediate environment (which includes other agents), this paper is devoted to the conditions in which strategies can be viewed as the result of interactions between simple agents, each of them having only local information about the state of the world. Our approach is based on the study of some examples of reactive agents applications. Their features are briefly described and we underline, in each of them, what we call the emergent strategies obtained from the local interactions between the agents. Three examples are studied this way: the eco-problem-solving implementations of Pengi and the N-Puzzle, and the sociogenesis process occurring in the artificial ant colonies that compose the MANTA project. We then consider a typical strategical game (chess), and see how to decompose it through a distributed reactive approach called MARCH. Some characteristics of the game are analysed and we conclude on the necessity to handle both a global strategy and local tactics in order to obtain a decently strong chess program.