THE ADAPTIVENESS OF METACOMMUNICATIVE INTERACTION INA FORAGING ENVIRONMENT

摘要

In this paper we will describe an artificial life model that is used to provide an evolutionary grounding for meta communicative interaction (MCI)—utterance acts in which conversation-alists acknowledge understanding or request clarification. Specifically, we ran artificial life experiments on populations of foraging agents who are able to communicate about entities in asimulated environment, where the main difference between the populations is in their MCI capa-bility. Populations which possess MCI capabilities were quantitatively compared with those thatlack them with respect to their adaptability in diverse environments. These experiments revealsome clear differences between MCI-realised populations—that learn words using MCI—andMCI-non-realised population—that learn words solely by introspection, where the main findingusing this model is that in an increasingly complex language, MCI has overwhelming adaptivepower and importance. These results demonstrate in a very clear way how adaptive MCI can bein primordial settings of language use.