2001 Volume 37 Issue 5 Pages 455-464
In this paper, we focus on the emergence phenomenon related with artificial pheromone communication and swarm intelligence among many agents in Ants War environment, in which two colonies of artificial ant agents compete for the limited number of food items in order to survive in evolutionary process. The purpose of this research is to clarify the emerging process of communication and the relationship between communication and swarm intelligence. For investigation of communication, we introduce Shannon's entropy and the amount of information to externally measure “the effectivity of communication signals for decision-making of agents” and “the specialty of environmental situation in sending communication signals”. In computer simulations, we confirm that the amounts of information of pheromone sensory inputs and selecting of sending pheromone signal are increased with correlation according to the progress of evolution. These experimental results derive that evolutionary communication is incrementally formed by the interaction among agents with self-organization and the self-reinforcement in communication-loop of repeated sending and receiving signals. In addition, we confirm the level of swarm intelligence with evolved pheromone communications by measurement of the correlation between the size of swarm and the performance in Ants War. In investigation, we find that the size of swarm and emergence of swarm intelligence are strongly related. The results introduced in this research will be a base for investigation of multi-agent communications.
