Environmental Risk, Cooperation, and Communication Complexity

The evolution of collaboration and communication in communities of individuals is a puzzling problem for a wide range of scientific disciplines, spanning from evolutionary theory to the theory and application of multiagent systems. A key issue is what factors affect collaboration and communication evolution and what is their effect on these. To address this problem, here we choose the environmental risk as a compact descriptor of the environment in a model world of simple agents. We analyse of evolution of cooperation and communication in function of the environmental risk. Our findings show that collaboration is more likely to raise to high levels within the agent society in a world characterised by high risk than in one characterised by low risk. With respect to the evolution of communications, we found that communities of agents with high level of collaboration are morel likely to use less complex communication than those which show lower levels of collaboration.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: AAMAS
• Authors: Péter András, Gilbert Roberts, John Lazarus
• Keywords: AAMAS 2002, Collaboration, Communication, Environmental Risk, Intelligent Agents