Surviving in a Hostile Multi-Agent Environment: How Simple Affective States Can Aid in the Competition for Resources

Scheutz, Matthias

In this paper, I will argue that agents with simple affective inner states (that can be interpreted as “hunger” and “mood”) can have an advantage over agents without such states if these states are used to modulate the agents’ behavior in specific ways. The claim will be confirmed using results from experiments done in a simulation of a multi-agent environment, in which agents have to compete for resources in order to survive.

@incollection{scheutz00ai,
  title={Surviving in a Hostile Multi-Agent Environment: How Simple Affective States Can Aid in the Competition for Resources},
  author={Scheutz, Matthias},
  year={2000},
  booktitle={Proceedings of AI 2000: The Thirteenth Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  publisher={Springer},
  pages={389--399}
  url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/scheutz00ai.pdf}
}