Abstract
A basic N x M instance (game) of the Pursuit Problem is one in which N pursuing agents try to capture as many as possible of M prey agents by surrounding them, on a rectilinear grid. The 4 × 1 game has been considered as a testbed for comparing the effectiveness of different multiagent distributed architectures, and the 6 × 2 game has received a little attention. This paper reports a systematic exercise in evaluating the quality of pursuit games as potential testbeds for distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). Genetic algorithms (GAs) have been used both to optimise low-level architectural features of agents and to search the (N, M) space of games. The conclusion from experiments is that (M + 4) × M games have the right complexity to be good testbeds, provided that M > 4. Additionally, the paper demonstrates the usefulness of GAs as tools to help DAI designers, and argues that boredom is a concept that deserves consideration as a feature of general agent architectures.
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Manela, M., Campbell, J.A. (1995). Designing good pursuit problems as testbeds for distributed AI: A novel application of genetic algorithms. In: Castelfranchi, C., Müller, JP. (eds) From Reaction to Cognition. MAAMAW 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 957. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027067
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027067
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