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If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with: How individual habituation of agent interactions improves global utility

If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with: How individual habituation of agent interactions improves global utility
If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with: How individual habituation of agent interactions improves global utility
Simple distributed strategies that modify the behaviour of selfish individuals in a manner that enhances cooperation or global efficiency have proved difficult to identify. We consider a network of selfish agents who each optimise their individual utilities by coordinating (or anti-coordinating) with their neighbours, to maximise the pay-offs from randomly weighted pair-wise games. In general, agents will opt for the behaviour that is the best compromise (for them) of the many conflicting constraints created by their neighbours, but the attractors of the system as a whole will not maximise total utility. We then consider agents that act as 'creatures of habit' by increasing their preference to coordinate (anti-coordinate) with whichever neighbours they are coordinated (anti-coordinated) with at the present moment. These preferences change slowly while the system is repeatedly perturbed such that it settles to many different local attractors. We find that under these conditions, with each perturbation there is a progressively higher chance of the system settling to a configuration with high total utility. Eventually, only one attractor remains, and that attractor is very likely to maximise (or almost maximise) global utility. This counterintutitve result can be understood using theory from computational neuroscience; we show that this simple form of habituation is equivalent to Hebbian learning, and the improved optimisation of global utility that is observed results from wellknown generalisation capabilities of associative memory acting at the network scale. This causes the system of selfish agents, each acting individually but habitually, to collectively identify configurations that maximise total utility.
978-0-262-29075-3
659-666
MIT Press
Davies, Adam
5c959da0-2515-4b94-a7a0-274bbe6d850b
Watson, Richard
ce199dfc-d5d4-4edf-bd7b-f9e224c96c75
Mills, Rob
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Buckley, C. L.
403be04e-fca5-4f1c-b0c4-d84401f51d51
Noble, Jason
440f07ba-dbb8-4d66-b969-36cde4e3b764
Fellerman, Harold
Dörr, Mark
Hanczyc, Martin M.
Ladegaard Laursen, Lone
Maurer, Sarah
Merkle, Daniel
Monnard, Pierre-Alain
Stoy, Kasper
Rasmussen, Steen
Davies, Adam
5c959da0-2515-4b94-a7a0-274bbe6d850b
Watson, Richard
ce199dfc-d5d4-4edf-bd7b-f9e224c96c75
Mills, Rob
3d53d4bc-e1de-4807-b89b-f5813f2172a7
Buckley, C. L.
403be04e-fca5-4f1c-b0c4-d84401f51d51
Noble, Jason
440f07ba-dbb8-4d66-b969-36cde4e3b764
Fellerman, Harold
Dörr, Mark
Hanczyc, Martin M.
Ladegaard Laursen, Lone
Maurer, Sarah
Merkle, Daniel
Monnard, Pierre-Alain
Stoy, Kasper
Rasmussen, Steen

Davies, Adam, Watson, Richard, Mills, Rob, Buckley, C. L. and Noble, Jason (2010) If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with: How individual habituation of agent interactions improves global utility. Fellerman, Harold, Dörr, Mark, Hanczyc, Martin M., Ladegaard Laursen, Lone, Maurer, Sarah, Merkle, Daniel, Monnard, Pierre-Alain, Stoy, Kasper and Rasmussen, Steen (eds.) In Artificial Life XII: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. MIT Press. pp. 659-666 .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Simple distributed strategies that modify the behaviour of selfish individuals in a manner that enhances cooperation or global efficiency have proved difficult to identify. We consider a network of selfish agents who each optimise their individual utilities by coordinating (or anti-coordinating) with their neighbours, to maximise the pay-offs from randomly weighted pair-wise games. In general, agents will opt for the behaviour that is the best compromise (for them) of the many conflicting constraints created by their neighbours, but the attractors of the system as a whole will not maximise total utility. We then consider agents that act as 'creatures of habit' by increasing their preference to coordinate (anti-coordinate) with whichever neighbours they are coordinated (anti-coordinated) with at the present moment. These preferences change slowly while the system is repeatedly perturbed such that it settles to many different local attractors. We find that under these conditions, with each perturbation there is a progressively higher chance of the system settling to a configuration with high total utility. Eventually, only one attractor remains, and that attractor is very likely to maximise (or almost maximise) global utility. This counterintutitve result can be understood using theory from computational neuroscience; we show that this simple form of habituation is equivalent to Hebbian learning, and the improved optimisation of global utility that is observed results from wellknown generalisation capabilities of associative memory acting at the network scale. This causes the system of selfish agents, each acting individually but habitually, to collectively identify configurations that maximise total utility.

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Published date: 2010
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity, EEE

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 271981
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/271981
ISBN: 978-0-262-29075-3
PURE UUID: ee02d86f-d689-423b-8918-6ff5500eae73
ORCID for Richard Watson: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-2521-8255

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Date deposited: 02 Feb 2011 15:00
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:21

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Contributors

Author: Adam Davies
Author: Richard Watson ORCID iD
Author: Rob Mills
Author: C. L. Buckley
Author: Jason Noble
Editor: Harold Fellerman
Editor: Mark Dörr
Editor: Martin M. Hanczyc
Editor: Lone Ladegaard Laursen
Editor: Sarah Maurer
Editor: Daniel Merkle
Editor: Pierre-Alain Monnard
Editor: Kasper Stoy
Editor: Steen Rasmussen

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