In a previous paper we presented simulation results that demonstrated the evolution of "tag based" groups composed of cooperative (in-group altruistic) individual agents erforming specialised functions. We showed how "teams" of individual maximisers (who copy the behaviours of those who outperform them) come to form internally specialised and ooperative groups that efficiently exploit their environment. We have also demonstrated that the efficiency of the specialisation process is highly dependent on the "searching strategy" employed by agents to locate in-group members with required skills. Specifically we showed that populations of agents with "smart" searching strategies outperformed populations of "dumb" (random) search strategies - even when the costs of smart searching were much higher. We hypothesised that in mixed populations smart strategies would out-evolve dumb ones. In this paper we test this hypothesis. Our results show that smart strategies do indeed outperform dumb strategies for significant periods of time but that dumb strategies persist also. The time series of individual runs show cycles of smart and dumb strategies in the population over generations. We argue that the study of such phenomena offers a possible minimal way towards understanding the evolution of institutional roles and internal pecialisation - without positing actions that originate at the supra-individual level (though we do not discount such actions).
展开▼
