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 presented that nonetheless allows investigation of communication and coordination and circumvents these problems. Experiments are presented in which the development of coordination can be observed. The task is a pursuit problem where four agents are necessary to capture a randomly moving prey. One of these agents adapted its behavior on the basis of coordination signals it received from three other agents. The development of coordination increased the capture rate in this pursuit problem from an initial 5% to over 90%. The results suggest that the communication of elementary signals and a general learning mechanism can result in the development of coordination. 1 Introduction The work reported in this paper is part of the Origins of Language programme, in which principles are investigated that may explai..