The Origins of Communication Revisited
- Started
- 1st July 2010
- Ended
- 13th April 2011
- Research Team
- Jordi Arranz
- Investigators
- Jason Noble
Illustration of the evolved sequence of behaviours in a typical case. A: agents rotate until one reaches a favoured orientation. B: the first agent to achieve this starts moving backwards and forwards. C: the second agent orbits the first until it is alig
Quinn (2001) sought to demonstrate that communication be- tween simulated agents could be evolved without pre-defined communication channels. Quinn’s work was exciting because it showed the potential for ALife models to look at the real origin of communication; however, the work has never been replicated. In order to test the generality of Quinn’s result we use a similar task but a completely different agent architecture. We find that qualitatively similar behaviours emerge, but it is not clear whether they are genuinely communicative. We extend Quinn’s work by adding perceptual noise and internal state to the agents in order to promote ritualization of the nascent signal. Results were inconclusive; philosophical implications are discussed.
Categories
Life sciences simulation: Ecology, Evolution
Algorithms and computational methods: Agents, Evolutionary Algorithms
Programming languages and libraries: C++
Transdisciplinary tags: Complex Systems