Adapting Populations of Agents

We control a population of interacting software agents. The agents have a strategy, and receive a payoff for executing that strategy. Unsuccessful agents become extinct. We investigate the repercussions of maintaining a diversity of agents. There is often no economic rationale for this. If maintaining diversity is to be successful, i.e. without lowering too much the payoff for the non-endangered strategies, it has to go on forever, because the non-endangered strategies still get a good payoff, so that they continue to thrive, and continue to endanger the endangered strategies. This is not sustainable if the number of endangered ones is of the same order as the number of non-endangered ones. We also discuss niches, islands. Finally, we combine learning as adaptation of individual agents with learning via selection in a population. 1 Populations of Software Agents In this paper we study a population of software agents [9] that interact with each other. By drawing an analogy between the e...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: AAMAS
• Authors: Philippe De Wilde, Maria Chli, Luís Correia, Rita Almeida Ribeiro, Pedro Mariano, Vladimir Abramov, Jan Goossenaerts
• Keywords: AAMAS 2002, Intelligent Agents, Non-endangered Strategies, Replicator Dynamics, Software Agents