31 research outputs found
Collective Motion of Predictive Swarms
Theoretical models of populations and swarms typically start with the
assumption that the motion of agents is governed by the local stimuli. However,
an intelligent agent, with some understanding of the laws that govern its
habitat, can anticipate the future, and make predictions to gather resources
more efficiently. Here we study a specific model of this kind, where agents aim
to maximize their consumption of a diffusing resource, by attempting to predict
the future of a resource field and the actions of other agents. Once the agents
make a prediction, they are attracted to move towards regions that have, and
will have, denser resources. We find that the further the agents attempt to see
into the future, the more their attempts at prediction fail, and the less
resources they consume. We also study the case where predictive agents compete
against non-predictive agents and find the predictors perform better than the
non-predictors only when their relative numbers are very small. We conclude
that predictivity pays off either when the predictors do not see too far into
the future or the number of predictors is small.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure
The Organization and Control of an Evolving Interdependent Population
Starting with Darwin, biologists have asked how populations evolve from a low
fitness state that is evolutionarily stable to a high fitness state that is
not. Specifically of interest is the emergence of cooperation and
multicellularity where the fitness of individuals often appears in conflict
with that of the population. Theories of social evolution and evolutionary game
theory have produced a number of fruitful results employing two-state two-body
frameworks. In this study we depart from this tradition and instead consider a
multi-player, multi-state evolutionary game, in which the fitness of an agent
is determined by its relationship to an arbitrary number of other agents. We
show that populations organize themselves in one of four distinct phases of
interdependence depending on one parameter, selection strength. Some of these
phases involve the formation of specialized large-scale structures. We then
describe how the evolution of independence can be manipulated through various
external perturbations.Comment: To download simulation code cf. article in Proceedings of the Royal
Society, Interfac