curiousIn this experiment, each agent could send a binary message (a short string of ones and zeroes) to a central message board, and could also perceive the messages of the other three agents. With this rudimentary communications framework and no formal language, groups of agents were thrown into random configurations and allowed to pursue their prey for five thousand moves. The programs of the most successful agents were then cross-bred and thrown into new random situations, repeat chorus. In the early phases of the experiment, the messages on the message board were essentially random, but because the agents were designed to try different strategies, and because the ones with the most successful strategies propagated while the least successful died out, they evolved a language over time that allowed them to coordinate their hunt.
More importantly, the researchers found that successful predators evolved language more efficiently if their communication was limited in length in the beginning and grew over time, rather than being uniformly large from the beginning. Expanding the available message size after the predators learned to use shorter "words" allowed the agents to evolve a functioning language much faster. Limiting the message length also seemed to lead the predators to evolve "words" that had different meanings in different situations. (The authors compared this to the word drive, which is a noun or a verb depending on use.) Most astonishing of all, the authors of the study could not always decipher the agents' language. They knew the predators were saying something useful to each other, since they were getting better at chasing down the prey, but finding a Rosetta Stone for human-agentese proved impossible.
The scientific overlaps in this experiment are enormous -- computer science, linguistics, evolutionary theory, even genetics, as the authors encoded the agents' programs into "chromosomes" and shuffled those chromosomes between generations in a process modeled on reproduction. Practical applications for this work are some time off, but its easy to see how Net-crawling agents with evolved language could become part of the Internet's infrastructure....."
Developing it's own language for things that the programmers couldn't decipher...
That's bloody interesting...
I have to wonder just how far off Artificial Intelligence is, seeing as they're in essence "thinking" for themselves by developing their own words. You have to remember, we didn't program the words for them, they came up with them.
