XPost: comp.ai.alife   
   From: otterlo@cs.utwente.nl   
      
   Christian Guttmann wrote:   
   >   
   > Hello,   
   >   
   > I am currently looking into communication and collaboration among   
   > agents. Does anyone have an educated answer about the following question.   
   >   
   >  > Is collaboration possible without communication?   
      
   Hi Christian,   
      
   The large mass of multi-agent (reinforcement) learning is about learning   
   some task with multiple agents, without communicating at all.   
   Many systems work by 'shared rewards', so that agents will learn to do   
   their actions in the benefit of the whole system. More sophisticated   
   approaches use for example 'wonderful life utility' in which the   
   difference between system+agent1 and system-without-agent1 for example.   
      
   A very useful reference to early work on the interplay between learning   
   and communication is the work done by Tan (1993). See also chapter 6   
   (?) of the book on multi-agent systems by Weiss (1999).   
      
   Bye,   
      
   Martijn.   
   --   
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------   
   Martijn van Otterlo              Tel:    (31)(53) 489 4111   
   TKI, Dept. of Computer Science,  Fax:    (31)(53) 489 3503   
   Twente University                e-mail: otterlo@cs.utwente.nl   
   Postbus 217, 7500 AE Enschede,   Web: http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~otterlo   
   The Netherlands   
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