Cambier, N.

Ferrante, Eliseo

Frémont, V.

English

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VU Research PortalInfluence of a collective behaviour on the Naming GameCambier, N.; Frémont, V.; Ferrante, Eliseopublished inSecond International Workshop on Social Learning and Cultural Evolution (SlaCE)2017Link to publication in VU Research Portalcitation for published version (APA)Cambier, N., Frémont, V., & Ferrante, E. (2017). Influence of a collective behaviour on the Naming Game. InSecond International Workshop on Social Learning and Cultural Evolution (SlaCE)General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediatelyand investigate your claim.E-mail address:vuresearchportal.ub@vu.nlDownload date: 22. May. 2021Influence of a collective behaviouron the Naming GameNicolas CambierSorbonne universités,Université de technologie de Compiègne,UMR CNRS 7253 Heudiasyc,Compiègne, France(E-mail: nicolas.cambier@hds.utc.fr)Vincent FrémontSorbonne universités,Université de technologie de Compiègne,UMR CNRS 7253 Heudiasyc,Compiègne, France(E-mail: vincent.fremont@hds.utc.fr)Eliseo FerranteLaboratory of Socio-ecologyand Social Evolution,KU Leuven,Leuven, Belgium(E-mail: eliseo.ferrante@kuleuven.be)AbstractLanguage games are models that have been developed for the study of self-organised natural language evolution. They are usedto study the emergence of a shared vocabulary through a self-organisation process. One instance of language games is the NamingGame, which models the emergence of conventions in a population using a simplistic communication protocol between agents. Inits original configuration, this game is played by two agents who have to agree on a word to name a predetermined topic. In orderto reach this goal, the agents take two different roles; the speaker, who proposes a word, and the hearer, who accepts or refusesthe word on the basis of whether it had already heard it. The game is deemed successful if the speaker proposes a word already inthe hearer’s lexicon, in which case they both forget all other words. Later revisions of the naming game allow simultaneous gamesin larger populations: here, the speaker can broadcast words, and thus does not update its lexicon according to the success of thegame. This version of the Naming Game has the same consensus dynamic as the original. The Naming Game has been used tostudy the emergence of social conventions in various settings such as linguistics, culture, or economy. The dynamics of this modelhas been thoroughly characterised with various static topologies of agents’ interaction. Only recently, this model has been portedin the context of swarm robotics, the study of the design of collective behaviours in large populations of robots using only localinteractions and local communication. The goal of this study was to understand effect of embodiment and random agent mobilityon the evolution of language in large populations. These results have shown that, even in that setting, the naming game exhibits thesame outcome as in simpler simulations: all agents achieve consensus on a single word.Our work aims at studying the consensus dynamics of the Naming Game in the case where a swarm of robots is exhibiting acollective behaviour. Our goal differs from those of previous studies, which focused on the dynamics of the Naming Game in settingswith static topologies of agents’ interactions or having dynamic topologies induced by agents following an individual random walk.To this end, our intention is to bring the Naming Game to swarm robotics and initiate a systematic study of the interaction betweenthis model and the numerous collective behaviours that characterise this field.Apart from approaches that include communication implicitly as a component of the individual behaviour leading to the desiredcollective behaviour, other studies have more explicitly focused on the emergence of communication itself within a swarm, focusingon questions such as: ”When is communication needed in the first place?”, ”How does language emerge?”, and ”Which form shouldcommunication take in order to be most effective?”. Moreover, most of the work done in the above direction has focused on thebiological evolution of language (biolinguistics): They belong to the framework of evolutionary swarm robotics, which studies theapplication of biological evolutionary models to swarm robotics. Thus, the cultural evolution of language (evolutionary linguistics)has mostly been overlooked in swarm robotics; a gap we propose to bridge.So far, our work has focused on the interaction effect between the naming game and one of the simplest, yet most importantcollective behaviour studied in swarm robotics: self-organised aggregation. Self-organised aggregation is a decision-making processwhereby agents need to gather all around the same area, without relying to global information, global communication, or any kindof centralised information or decision.In our work, the aggregation behaviour of the robots is modelled by a probabilistic finite state automaton (PFSA), inspired fromobservations of cockroach larvae, which decides whether to leave or join an aggregate. In this PFSA, the probability to join anaggregate is complementary to the probability to leave it and increases with the size of the aggregate, i.e. larger groups are moreattractive for settling. Moreover, we anchored the Naming Game into this behaviour by making successful games a condition tojoin–or even stay–in aggregates. This new algorithm can be understood as robots having to collectively decide on a new place toswarm, but being able to do so only if they can agree on a name for this place.Experiments in simulated environments reveal that this combination influences the dynamics of the Naming Game as well as ofaggregation: it allows aggregation to form a controllable number of groups and, more importantly, each emerging group convergeson a different word. This is a brand new feature as previous studies all showed an eventual consensus on a single world. Thisnew model we propose could be useful to represent competing ideologies, identities, or cultural conventions: It could be used tounderstand how they can be bound to a geographical place (as it happens for languages) and how they spread according to thedisplacements of their proponents.KeywordsEvolutionary linguistics, language game, naming game, self-organised aggregation, swarm robotics.Acknowledgements: This work was carried out and funded in the framework of the Labex MS2T. It was supported by theFrench Government, through the program Investments for the future managed by the National Agency for Research (ReferenceANR-11-IDEX-0004-02). This work was also carried out and funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) andby the Regional Council of Hauts de France.

Influence of a collective behaviour on the Naming Game

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Influence of a collective behaviour on the Naming Game

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