Novelty-Seeking Multi-Agent Systems

This paper considers novelty-seeking multi-agent systems as a step towards more efficient generation of creative artifacts. We describe a simple multi-agent architecture where agents have limited resources and exercise self-criticism, veto power and voting to collectively regulate which artifacts are selected to the domain i.e., the cultural storage of the system. To overcome their individual resource limitations, agents have a limited access to the artifacts already in the domain which they can use to guide their search for novel artifacts. Creating geometric images called spirographs as a case study, we show that novelty-seeking multi-agent systems can be more productive in generating novel artifacts than a single-agent or monolithic system. In particular, veto power is in our case an effective collaborative decision-making strategy for enhancing novelty of domain artifacts, and self-criticism of agents can significantly reduce the collaborative effort in decision mak-