The Evolution of Communication Schemes Over Continuous Channels

Many problems impede the design of multiagent systems, not the least of which is the passing of information between agents. While others hand implement communication routes and semantics, we explore a method by which communication can evolve. In the experiments described here, we model agents as connectionist networks. We supply each agent with a number of communications channels implemented by the addition of both input and output units for each channel. The output units initiate environmental signals whose amplitude decay over distance and are perturbed by environmental noise. An agent does not receive input from other individuals, rather the agent’s input reflects the summation of all other agents’ output signals along that channel. Because we use real-valued activations, the agents communicate using real-valued vectors. Under our evolutionary program, GNARL, the agents coevolve a communication scheme over continuous channels which conveys task-specific information.