Wise-Up! - Smart Tag Pairing Evolves and Persists
CPM Report No.: 02-90
By: David Hales
Date: 12th March 2002.
Abstract
In a previous paper (Hales 2002a) we presented simulation results that demonstrated the evolution
of “tag based” groups composed of cooperative (in-group altruistic) individual agents performing
specialised functions. In a subsequent paper (Hales 2002b) we demonstrated that the efficiency of
the specialisation process was 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.
Accessible as: