Coordination Developed by Learning from Evaluations

This paper reports on research into the origins of communication and coordination. Several problems with defining communication and coordination are noted. A research methodology is described that circumvents these problems. The methodology is used in an experiment concerning the development of coordination. The aim of the experiment is to see whether a learning agent can use coordination signals, which represent evaluations of its behavior, to learn to coordinate its actions in an unknown environment. The task is a pursuit problem where four agents are needed to capture a randomly moving prey. One of these agents adapts its behavior based on the coordination signals it receives from the three other agents. The development of coordination increased the capture rate in this pursuit problem from an initial 5% to 93%. Thus, in combination with a general learning mechanism, coordination signals may be sufficient for the development of coordination.