Synthetic Ethology and the Evolution of Cooperative Communication

Abstract

Synthetic ethology is proposed as a means of conducting controlled experiments investigating the mechanisms and evolution of communication. After a discussion of the goals and methods of synthetic ethology, two series of experiments are described based on at least 5000 breeding cycles. The first demonstrates the evolution of cooperative communication in a population of simple machines. The average fitness of the population and the organization of its use of signals are compared under three conditions: communication suppressed, communication permitted, and communication permitted in the presence of learning. Where communication is permitted, the fitness increases approximately 26 times faster than when communication is suppressed; with communication and learning, the rate of fitness increase is nearly 100-fold The second series of experiments illustrates the evolution of a syntactically simple language, in which a pair of signals is required for effective communication.

Information and Meaning: Use-Based Models in Arrays of Neural Nets

“…As Ackley and Littman (1994) note, the result is an artificial environment "where 'truthful speech' by a speaker and 'right action' by a listener cause food to rain down on both " (p. 40). In some studies the target has been explicitly limited to 'communication for cooperation ' (MacLennan and Burghardt, 1994;Levin, 1995;Wagner, 2000). That restriction, of course, also limits the generalizability of such models to communication or information transfer in general.…”

“…A referential theory, in which the meaning of a term is taken to be the object or situation it applies to, is more or less explicit in Batali (1995), Oliphant andBatali (1996), andMacLennan andBurghardt (1994). We take it to be a clear indication that the theory in play is a relational theory of the ideational variety when the measure of 'identity of meaning' or 'successful communication' is correspondence between individuals' representation maps or signal matrices.…”

“…In the spirit of a theory of meaning as use, we on the contrary take communication to involve dynamic behavioral coordination across a community. We thus follow the general strategy of MacLennan and Burghardt (1994) and Hutchins and Hazelhurst (1995) in emphasizing the community rather than the individual in building a model of language development. Luc Steels' (1998) outline of this shared perspective is particularly eloquent: Language may be a mass phenomenon actualised by the different agents interacting with each other.…”

The effect of noise on the performance of cultural evolution in multi-agent systems

“…An approach known as synthetic ethology [6], [7] argues that the study of language is too difficult to perform in real world situations and that more meaningful results could be produced by modelling organisms and their environment in an artificial manner. Artificial intelligence systems can create tightly controlled environments where the behaviour of artificial organisms can be readily observed and modified.…”

“…A number of approaches were considered for the implementation of cultural learning including fixed lexicons [10], [11], indexed memory [12], cultural artifacts [13], [14] and signalsituation tables [6]. The approach chosen was the increasingly popular teacher/pupil scenario [15], [1], [11] where a number of highly fit agents are selected from the population to act as teachers for the next generation of agents, labelled pupils.…”