Minority Rule Applied to Multiple Agents Linked into a Social Network with Communication and Memory Marco Remondino and Alessandro CappelliniMinority Rule Applied to Multiple Agents Linked into a Social Network with Communication and Memory

Abstract

simulation, communication In our work we simulate a community of agents, linked into a simple social network based on communication among the nodes, who must take a binary decision at every step. This resembles the original Minority Game (MG), which is a simple, generalized framework, belonging to the Game Theory field, which represents the collective behaviour of agents in an idealized situation where they have to compete through adaptation for some finite resource. It generalizes the study of how many individuals may reach a collective solution to a problem under adaptation of each one’s expectations about the future. The main differences between this work and the original MG are the introduction of communication among the agents, which are now grouped basing on the common choices, and the number of players, that can also be an even number, while in the MG must be an odd number. This is done in order to generalize as much as possible the study of the choices made by agents trying to be in the minority group. Two communication protocols are implemented in the model: the asynchronous one, in which the agents act sequentially. So the first agents which act take their decision, and from then on they reply to the other agents with the new decision taken. The synchronous protocol states that the agents always communicate to the others their original opinion: they broadcast their opinion to all the agents which are linked to them. Finally, after having collected all the opinions of their friends, they reconsider their choice. After examining some random choosing agents, we embed a sort of memory into them, so that they can reason on which has been the best choice by looking at the past n results