Emergence of Cooperation: State of the Art

Geoff Nitschke
2005 Artificial Life  
This article presents a review of prevalent results within research pertaining to emergent cooperation in biologically inspired artificial social systems. Results reviewed maintain particular reference to biologically inspired design principles, given that current mathematical and empirical tools have provided only a partial insight into elucidating mechanisms responsible for emergent cooperation, and then only in systems of an abstract nature. This article aims to provide an overview of
more » ... nt and disparate research contributions that investigate utilization of biologically inspired concepts such as emergence, evolution and self-organization as a means of attaining cooperation in artificial social systems. An introduction and overview of emergent cooperation in artificial life is presented, followed by a survey of emergent cooperation in swarm-based systems, the pursuit-evasion domain and robo-cup soccer. The final section draws conclusions regarding future directions of emergent cooperation as a problem-solving methodology that is potentially applicable in a wide range of problem domains. Within each of these sections and their respective themes of research, the mechanisms deemed to be responsible for emergent cooperation are elucidated and their key limitations highlighted. The article concludes that current studies in emergent cooperative behavior are limited by a lack of situated and embodied approaches, and the research infancy of current biologically inspired design approaches. Though despite these limiting factors, emergent cooperation maintains considerable future potential in a wide variety of application domains where systems comprised of many interacting components must cooperatively solve unanticipated global tasks.
doi:10.1162/1064546054407194 pmid:16053576 fatcat:4sznnxnyuffgdlavqmse6eyvba