The distribution of agents to resources in a networked multi- player environment

A problem faced by all mobile organisms is how to search their environment for resources. Animals forage their environment for food, web-users surf the internet for desired data, and businesses mine the land for valuable minerals. When an individual organism forages their environment for resources, they typically employ a form of reinforcement learning to allocate their foraging time to the regions with the highest utility in terms of providing resources [Ballard 1997]. As the organism travels in its environment, it gathers information about resource distributions and uses this information to inform its subsequent movements. When an organism forages in an environment that consists, in part, of other organisms that are also foraging, then additional complexities arise. The resources available to an organism are affected not just by the foraging behavior the organism itself, but also by the simultaneous foraging behavior of all of the other organisms. The optimal resource foraging strategy for an organism is no longer a simple function of the distribution of resources and movement costs, but it is also a function of the strategies adopted by other organisms. Even if the resources are replenished with a constant rate, the optimal foraging strategy for an organism may fluctuate depending on the other organisms’ behavior. This research will collect a large volume of time-evolving data from a system composed of human agents vying for resources in a common environment with the aim of guiding the development of computational models of human resource allocation. We have developed an experimental platform that allows many human participants to interact in real-time within a common virtual world. Inside this world, two resource pools were created, and we recorded the moment-by-moment exploitation of these resources by each human agent. The research questions motivating the current study are: “How do resource foraging strategies unfold with time?,” “Are there systematic suboptimalities in resource foraging?,” and “How are foraging strategies affected by the distribution of resources and the agents’ knowledge of the environment?”