Emergence of Cooperation: State of the Art

Abstract

This review presents a review of prevalent results within research pertaining to emergent cooperation in biologically inspired artificial social systems. Results reviewed maintain particular reference to biologically inspired design principles, given that current mathematical and empirical tools have provided only a partial insight into elucidating mechanisms responsible for emergent cooperation, and then only in systems of an abstract nature. This review aims to provide an overview of important and disparate research contributions that investigate utilization of biologically inspired concepts such as emergence, evolution, and self-organization as a means of attaining cooperation in artificial social systems. An introduction and overview of emergent cooperation in artificial life is presented, followed by a survey of emergent cooperation in swarm-based systems, the pursuit-evasion domain, and RoboCup soccer. The final section draws conclusions regarding future directions of emergent cooperation as a problem-solving methodology that is potentially applicable in a wide range of problem domains. Within each of these sections and their respective themes of research, the mechanisms deemed to be responsible for emergent cooperation are elucidated and their key limitations highlighted. The review concludes that current studies in emergent cooperative behavior are limited by a lack of situated and embodied approaches, and by the research infancy of current biologically inspired design approaches. Despite these limiting factors, emergent cooperation maintains considerable future potential in a wide variety of application domains where systems composed of many interacting components must cooperatively perform unanticipated global tasks.

Emergent Specialization in Biologically Inspired Collective Behavior Systems

“…Although, specialized behaviors of individual soccer agents was either specified a priori or was derived in simplistic game scenarios (Matsubara, Noda, & Hiraki, 1996), (Stone & Veloso, 2002), (Stone & Veloso, 1998a), (Stone & Veloso, 1998b), (Whiteson et al, 2003), 32 (Hsu & Gustafson, 2001), (Hsu & Gustafson, 2002), (Luke et al, 1998). Each of these research examples has been critiqued elsewhere (Nitschke, 2005), from the perspective of emergent cooperative behavior. Each is an example of the essential role of behavioral specialization, emergent or otherwise, for facilitating effective collective game playing behaviors.…”

“…The research of (Haynes & Sen, 1996) and (Yong & Miikkulainen, 2001) which specifically investigated the contribution and advantages of emergent specialization in prey-capture tasks that mandate cooperative behavior, have been reviewed in related work (Nitschke, 2005), and are thus not included here.…”

“…Similarly, the research of described the evolution of particular group formations in a simulated multi-robot system, which allowed efficient forms of coordinated group movement across an environment towards a light or sound 38 source. The research of , (Dorigo et al, 2004), has been reviewed in related work (Nitschke, 2005), from the perspective of emergent cooperation, and is thus not comprehensively described here.…”

Evolution of Individual Group Size Preference Can Increase Group-Level Selection and Cooperation

“…Understanding how cooperative social groups can evolve and be maintained is a major challenge in both artificial life [1,2] and evolutionary biology [3,4]. In particular, work on cooperative group formation has gained an impetus in recent years through a recognition of the major transitions in evolution [5], and the corresponding realisation that cooperation can be a driving force in evolution and not a mere curio [6].…”

“…Such transitions therefore represent premier examples of cooperative group formation. From the viewpoint of artificial life, understanding the mechanisms behind these transitions, and cooperative group formation more generally, may help us to understand the evolution of increased complexity [1,7], and to create applied systems where the evolution of a high degree of cooperation is supported [2].…”