Exploring Symbiotic Coevolution in Heterogeneous Ant Teams: A Research Study
This research investigates whether heterogeneous teams of evolving agents can learn to collaborate for survival. By using two specialized ant teams—soldiers and workers—operating in a grid-based environment filled with resources and threats, we apply NEAT algorithms. Soldiers protect workers from spiders while workers gather food. The study evaluates team performance through fitness measures, analyzing how evolved agents perform in combined or separate environments. Future work aims to enhance communication and shared fitness among agents to foster better cooperation.
Exploring Symbiotic Coevolution in Heterogeneous Ant Teams: A Research Study
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Presentation Transcript
Super Ants Matt deWet & David Robson
Symbiotic Coevolution • Primary research question: • “Can heterogeneous teams of evolving agents, who depend upon each other for survival, learn to work together?”
How to test that • Environment needed: • Two specialized teams of agents, run by NEAT • Different abilities, different roles • Can only survive by working together
Our Environment • Ants! • Soldiers & Workers • Environmental Threats • Spiders • These love the taste of worker flesh • Controlled by a static algorithm • Starvation • Great at killing spiders • Not so great at gathering food
Our Environment (cont’d) • The world • Bounded grid of variable size • Randomly placed food • Randomly spawned enemies • Movement • All entities move at most one space at a time on the grid • Movements all take place simultaneously, so no unit has an advantage
The Plan • Sensors • Soldiers can see nearby enemies and workers • Workers can see nearby food, enemies, and soldiers • Desired behavior • Soldiers learn to keep foraging workers safe • How can we tell? • Overall fitness? • Inspection
The Experiment • Control • Evolve the two groups separately, then stick them together and see how they do • Experiment • Evolve the two populations together, observe behavior • Variations: • Pre-evolved or un-evolved brains.
Current Work • Current fitness functions • Soldiers • fitness: Spiders killed • Workers • fitness: How much food is eaten • A video!
Future work • Shared fitness • Any shared fitness among all agents in one population is nullified, because only relative fitness is used to determine who reproduces. • Alternate fitness functions • Slightly more engineered • Updated sensors • Add nearby ants • Blob sensors
Questions? Ideas? Funny ant stories?