Tag Mechanisms Evaluated for Coordination in Open Multi-Agent Systems

摘要

Tags are arbitrary social labels carried by agents. When agents interact preferentially with those sharing the same Tag, groups are formed around similar Tags. This property can be used to achieve desired group coordination by evolving agent's Tags through a group selection process. In this paper Tags performance is for the first time compared by simulation with alternative mechanisms for coordinated learning in multi-agent systems populations. We target open systems, hence we do not make costly assumptions on agent capabilities (rational or computational). It is a requirement that coordination strategies prove simple to implement and scalable. We build a simulator incorporating competition and cooperation scenarios modeled as one-shot repeated games between agents. Tags prove to be a very good coordination mechanism in both, cooperation building in competitive scenarios and agent behavior coordination in fully cooperative scenarios.