The Advantages of the Signaling Strategy in a Dynamic Environment: Cognitive Modeling Using RoboCup

We report a cognitive modeling experiment where the RoboCup simulation environment was used to study the advantages provided by signals. We used the passing problem in RoboCup as our test problem and soccerplayers' 'yells' of their 'passability' values as the task-specific signals. We found that yells improve pass completion – using yells to decide the best player (to pass the ball) led to a 8-17 percentage points increase in performance compared to a centralized calculation of best pass. However, the passability values themselves did not make a difference, indicating that the advantage of signals come from their different perspective in identifying a pass, the actual content of signals do not matter. We present some problems we faced in using Robocup as a modeling environment, and suggest features that would help promote the use of RoboCup in cognitive modeling.