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Register a new userAn Agent-based Model of the Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Origins of Creative Cultural Evolution
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Added by
Liane Gabora
Publication date
2013
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Human culture is uniquely cumulative and open-ended. Using a computational model of cultural evolution in which neural network based agents evolve ideas for actions through invention and imitation, we tested the hypothesis that this is due to the capacity for recursive recall. We compared runs in which agents were limited to single-step actions to runs in which they used recursive recall to chain simple actions into complex ones. Chaining resulted in higher cultural diversity, open-ended generation of novelty, and no ceiling on the mean fitness of actions. Both chaining and no-chaining runs exhibited convergence on optimal actions, but without chaining this set was static while with chaining it was ever-changing. Chaining increased the ability to capitalize on the capacity for learning. These findings show that the recursive recall hypothesis provides a computationally plausible explanation of why humans alone have evolved the cultural means to transform this planet.
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In this paper we consider the problem of finding the most probable set of events that could have led to a set of partial, noisy observations of some dynamical system. In particular, we consider the case of a dynamical system that is a (possibly stochastic) time-stepping agent-based model with a discrete state space, the (possibly noisy) observations are the number of agents that have some given property and the events were interested in are the decisions made by the agents (their ``expressed behaviours) as the model evolves. We show that this problem can be reduced to an integer linear programming problem which can subsequently be solved numerically using a standard branch-and-cut algorithm. We describe two implementations, an ``offline algorithm that finds the maximum-a-posteriori expressed behaviours given a set of observations over a finite time window, and an ``online algorithm that incrementally builds a feasible set of behaviours from a stream of observations that may have no natural beginning or end. We demonstrate both algorithms on a spatial predator-prey model on a 32x32 grid with an initial population of 100 agents.
EVOC (for EVOlution of Culture) is a computer model of culture that enables us to investigate how various factors such as barriers to cultural diffusion, the presence and choice of leaders, or changes in the ratio of innovation to imitation affect the diversity and effectiveness of ideas. It consists of neural network based agents that invent ideas for actions, and imitate neighbors actions. The model is based on a theory of culture according to which what evolves through culture is not memes or artifacts, but the internal models of the world that give rise to them, and they evolve not through a Darwinian process of competitive exclusion but a Lamarckian process involving exchange of innovation protocols. EVOC shows an increase in mean fitness of actions over time, and an increase and then decrease in the diversity of actions. Diversity of actions is positively correlated with population size and density, and with barriers between populations. Slowly eroding borders increase fitness without sacrificing diversity by fostering specialization followed by sharing of fit actions. Introducing a leader that broadcasts its actions throughout the population increases the fitness of actions but reduces diversity of actions. Increasing the number of leaders reduces this effect. Efforts are underway to simulate the conditions under which an agent immigrating from one culture to another contributes new ideas while still fitting in.
Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a powerful paradigm to gain insight into social phenomena. One area that ABM has rarely been applied is coalition formation. Traditionally, coalition formation is modeled using cooperative game theory. In this paper, a heuristic algorithm is developed that can be embedded into an ABM to allow the agents to find coalition. The resultant coalition structures are comparable to those found by cooperative game theory solution approaches, specifically, the core. A heuristic approach is required due to the computational complexity of finding a cooperative game theory solution which limits its application to about only a score of agents. The ABM paradigm provides a platform in which simple rules and interactions between agents can produce a macro-level effect without the large computational requirements. As such, it can be an effective means for approximating cooperative game solutions for large numbers of agents. Our heuristic algorithm combines agent-based modeling and cooperative game theory to help find agent partitions that are members of a games core solution. The accuracy of our heuristic algorithm can be determined by comparing its outcomes to the actual core solutions. This comparison achieved by developing an experiment that uses a specific example of a cooperative game called the glove game. The glove game is a type of exchange economy game. Finding the traditional cooperative game theory solutions is computationally intensive for large numbers of players because each possible partition must be compared to each possible coalition to determine the core set; hence our experiment only considers games of up to nine players. The results indicate that our heuristic approach achieves a core solution over 90% of the time for the games considered in our experiment.
This paper describes a formalization of agent-based models (ABMs) as random walks on regular graphs and relates the symmetry group of those graphs to a coarse-graining of the ABM that is still Markovian. An ABM in which $N$ agents can be in $delta$ different states leads to a Markov chain with $delta^N$ states. In ABMs with a sequential update scheme by which one agent is chosen to update its state at a time, transitions are only allowed between system configurations that differ with respect to a single agent. This characterizes ABMs as random walks on regular graphs. The non-trivial automorphisms of those graphs make visible the dynamical symmetries that an ABM gives rise to because sets of micro configurations can be interchanged without changing the probability structure of the random walk. This allows for a systematic loss-less reduction of the state space of the model.
Following the remarkable success of the AlphaGO series, 2019 was a booming year that witnessed significant advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) techniques. MARL corresponds to the learning problem in a multi-agent system in which multiple agents learn simultaneously. It is an interdisciplinary domain with a long history that includes game theory, machine learning, stochastic control, psychology, and optimisation. Although MARL has achieved considerable empirical success in solving real-world games, there is a lack of a self-contained overview in the literature that elaborates the game theoretical foundations of modern MARL methods and summarises the recent advances. In fact, the majority of existing surveys are outdated and do not fully cover the recent developments since 2010. In this work, we provide a monograph on MARL that covers both the fundamentals and the latest developments in the research frontier. The goal of our monograph is to provide a self-contained assessment of the current state-of-the-art MARL techniques from a game theoretical perspective. We expect this work to serve as a stepping stone for both new researchers who are about to enter this fast-growing domain and existing domain experts who want to obtain a panoramic view and identify new directions based on recent advances.
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