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International Conference on Swarm Intelligence

ANTS 2022: Swarm Intelligence pp 155–170Cite as

Learning Resilient Swarm Behaviors via Ongoing Evolution

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13491))

Abstract

Grammatical evolution can be used to learn bio-inspired solutions to many distributed mulitagent tasks, but the programs learned by the agents are often not resilient to perturbations in the world. Biological inspiration from bacteria suggests that ongoing evolution can enable resilience, but traditional grammatical evolution algorithms learn too slowly to mimic rapid evolution because they utilize only vertical, parent-to-child genetic variation. Prior work with the BeTr-GEESE grammatical evolution algorithm showed that individual agents who use both vertical and lateral gene transfer rapidly learn programs that perform one step in a multi-step problem even though the programs cannot perform all required subtasks. This paper shows that BeTr-GEESE can use ongoing evolution to produce resilient collective behaviors on two goal-oriented spatial tasks, foraging and nest maintenance, in the presence of different types of perturbation. The paper then explores when and why BeTr-GEESE succeeds, emphasizing two potentially generalizable properties: modularity and locality. Modular programs enable real-time lateral transfer, leading to resilience. Locality means that the appropriate phenotypic behaviors are local to specific regions of the world (spatial locality) and that recently useful behaviors are likely to be useful again in the near future (temporal locality).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Resilient task performance differs from ecological resilience in which population sizes show resilience to variations [22] and from stability-based definitions of resilience in which some property of a collective remains in a locally stable region [24].

  2. 2.

    Divisible and additive multiagent tasks can be broken into subtasks achievable by individual programs that each contribute to the group problem to be solved [65].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Aadesh Neupane & Michael A. Goodrich

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  1. Aadesh Neupane
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  2. Michael A. Goodrich
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Correspondence to Aadesh Neupane .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Marco Dorigo

  2. University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

    Heiko Hamann

  3. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Manuel López-Ibáñez

  4. University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    José García-Nieto

  5. Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Andries Engelbrecht

  6. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA

    Carlo Pinciroli

  7. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Volker Strobel

  8. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Christian Camacho-Villalón

A PPA Grammar

A PPA Grammar

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Neupane, A., Goodrich, M.A. (2022). Learning Resilient Swarm Behaviors via Ongoing Evolution. In: Dorigo, M., et al. Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13491. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20176-9_13

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