Abstract
Communication plays a central role in the biology of most organisms, particularly social species. Although the neurophysiological processes of signal production and perception are well understood, the conditions conducive to the evolution of reliable systems of communication remain largely unknown. This is a particularly challenging problem because efficient communication requires tight coevolution between the signal emitted and the response elicited. We conducted experimental evolution with robots that could produce visual signals to provide information on food location. We found that communication readily evolves when colonies consist of genetically similar individuals and when selection acts at the colony level. We identified several distinct communication systems that differed in their efficiency. Once a given system of communication was well established, it constrained the evolution of more efficient communication systems. Under individual selection, the ability to produce visual signals resulted in the evolution of deceptive communication strategies in colonies of unrelated robots and a concomitant decrease in colony performance. This study generates predictions about the evolutionary conditions conducive to the emergence of communication and provides guidelines for designing artificial evolutionary systems displaying spontaneous communication.
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Mitri, S., Floreano, D., Keller, L. (2010). Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication. In: Nolfi, S., Mirolli, M. (eds) Evolution of Communication and Language in Embodied Agents. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01250-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01250-1_8
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