Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

Emergence of Cooperative Internet Server Sharing Among Internet Search Agents Caught in the n-Person Prisoner’s Dilemma Game

  • Published:
Knowledge and Information Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Information on the Internet can be collected by autonomous agents that send out queries to the servers that may have the information sought. From a single agent’s perspective, sending out as many queries as possible maximizes the chances of finding the information sought. However, if every agent does the same, the servers will be overloaded. The first major contribution of this paper is proving mathematically that the agents situated in such environments play the n-Person Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. The second is mathematically deriving the notion of effectiveness of cooperation among the agents in such environments and then presenting the optimal interval for the number of information sites for a given number of information-seeking agents. When the optimal interval is satisfied, cooperation among agents is effective, meaning that resources (e.g., servers) are optimally shared. Experimental results suggest that agents can better share available servers through the kinship-based cooperation without explicitly knowing about the entire environment. This paper also identifies difficulties of promoting cooperation in such environments and presents possible solutions. The long-term goal of this research is to elucidate the understanding of massively distributed multiagent environments such as the Internet and to identify valuable design principles of software agents in similar environments.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Axelrod R (1984) The evolution of cooperation. Basic Books, New York

  2. Bicchieri C, Pollack ME, Rovelli C, Tsamardinos I (1998) The potential for the evolution of cooperation among web agents. Int J Hum Comput Stud 48(1):9–29

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Colman AM (1982) Game theory and experimental games. Pergamon Press, Oxford

  4. Darwen PJ, Yao X (1997) Speciation as automatic categorical modularization. IEEE Trans Evol Comput 1(2):101–108

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Dawes RM (1980) Social dilemmas. Annu Rev Psychol 31:169–193

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Dent L, Boticario J, McDermott J, Zabowski D (1992) A personal learning apprentice, Proceedings of AAAI-92. AAAI Press/MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 96–103

  7. Dietz T, Rosa EA (1994) Rethinking the environmental impacts of population, affluence and technology. Hum Ecol Rev 1:277–300

    Google Scholar 

  8. Etzioni O, Hanks S, Weld D, Draper D, Lesh N, Williamson M (1992) An approach to planning with incomplete information. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, pp 115–125

  9. Etzioni O, Hanks S, Jiang T, Karp RM, Madani O, Waarts O (1996) Efficient information gathering on the internet. In: Proceedings of the 37th annual symposium on the foundation of computer science (FOCS ’96), Burlington, VT, 14–16 October 1996. IEEE Press, New York, pp 234–243

  10. Glance NS, Huberman BA (1993) The outbreak of cooperation. J Math Sociol 17(4):281–301

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Glance NS, Huberman BA (1994) The dynamics of social dilemma. Sci Am March 1994, pp 58–63

  12. Hardin G (1968) The tragedy of commons. Science 162:1243–1248

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Heylighen F (1992) ‘Selfish’ memes and the evolution of cooperation. J Ideas 2(4):77–84

    Google Scholar 

  14. Hoffmann R, Warning N (1996) The localization of interaction and learning in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma. Working Paper 96-08-064. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM

  15. Holland JH (1975) Adaptation in natural and artificial systems. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor

  16. Maes P, Kozierok R (1993) Learning interface agents. In: Proceedings of AAAI-93, Washington, DC, 11–15 July 1993, AAAI Press/MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 459–464

  17. Molander P (1992) The prevalence of free riding. J Conflict Resol 36(4):756–771

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Oh JC (1998) Emergence of kin habitats and cooperation in multi-agent environment. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on frontiers in evolutionary algorithms (FEA ’98), Research Triangle Park, NC, 23–28 October 1998, pp 387–390

  19. Oh JC (1999a) Effects of ‘physical body’ on biased opponent selection in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game (one page abstract). In: Proceedings of the genetic and evolutionary computation conference (GECCO-99), Orlando, FL, 13–17 July 1999, p 1447

  20. Oh JC (1999b) Ostracism for improving cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game, In: Proceedings of the congress on evolutionary computation 1999 (CEC99), Washington, DC, 10–16 July 1999, pp 891–896

  21. Oh JC (1999c) Proofs of the conditions of the n-person iterated prisoner’s dilemma game for the internet access problem. Technical Report No. TR-99-19. Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh

  22. Oh JC (2000a) Effects of the kinship bias on multi-agent environments: studies on theoretical models and the Internet access problem. PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh

  23. Oh JC (2000b) Promoting cooperation using ‘kin’ biased conditional strategy in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on frontiers in evolutionary algorithms (FEA 2000), 27 February–3 March 2000, pp 1044–1047

  24. Oliphant M (1994) Evolving cooperation in the non-iterated prisoner’s dilemma: the importance of spatial organization. In: Langton CG (ed) Artificial life IV. Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, pp 349–352

  25. Rapoport A (1967) Escape from paradox. Sci Am 217(1):62–69

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Riolo RL (1997) The effects of tag-mediated selection of partners in evolving populations playing the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Working Paper 97-02-016. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM

  27. Sandholm TW, Lesser VR (1995) Coalition formation among bounded rational agents. In: Proceedings of the 14th international joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI-95), Montréal, 20–25 August 1995, pp 662–671

  28. Seo Y-G, Cho SB, Yao X (2000) The impact of payoff function and local interaction on the n-player iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Knowl Inf Sys 2(4):461–478

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Shoham Y (1993) Agent-oriented programming. Artif Intell 60:51–92

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  30. Sims M, Goldman C, Lesser V, (2003) Self-organization through bottom-up coalition formation. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, Melbourne, Australia, 14–18 July 2003, pp 867–874

  31. Spears WM (1995) Speciation using tag bits. In: Handbook of evolutionary computation. IOP Publishing and Oxford University Press, Oxford

  32. Yao X, Darwen P (1994) An experimental study of n-person iterated prisoner’s dilemma games. Informatica 18(4):435–450

    Google Scholar 

  33. Yao X, Darwen PJ (1999) How important is your reputation in a multi-agent environment. In: Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE conference on systems, man, and cybernetics, Tokyo, 12–15 October 1999, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, pp II–575–580

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 13214, USA

    Jae C. Oh

Authors
  1. Jae C. Oh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jae C. Oh.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Oh, J. Emergence of Cooperative Internet Server Sharing Among Internet Search Agents Caught in the n-Person Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. Know. Inf. Sys. 7, 23–55 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-003-0117-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-003-0117-6

Keywords