Gossip, Sexual Recombination and the El Farol Bar: modelling the emergence of heterogeneity - Bruce Edmonds
By the end of the run described above agent-3 and agent-1 had developed a stand-alone repetoire of strategies which largely ignored what other agent said. Agent-3 had settled on what is called a mixed strategy in game theory, namely that it would go about two-thirds of the time in a randomly determined way, while agent-1 relied on largely deterministic forecasting strategies.
The other three agents had developed what might be called social strategies. Agent-2 seemed to have come to rely on `tricking' agent-4 into going when it was not, which explains the gradual accumulation of `NOT's in the example gene described above. Agent-4 has come to rely (at least somewhat) on what agent-2 says and likewise agent-5 uses what agent-4 says (although both mix this with other methods including a degree of randomness).
Thus although all agents were indistinguishable at the start of the run in terms of their resources and computational structure, they evolved not only different models but also very distinct strategies and roles.
The conclusion of the paper is that if one only allows global communicative mechanisms, and internal models of limited expressiveness then one might well be preventing the emergence of heterogeneity in your model. Or, to put it another way, endowing ones agents with the ability to make real social distinctions and (implicit or explicit) models of each other may allow the emergence of social situated behaviour that might be qualitatively different than a model without this capacity.
Such a conclusion marries well with other models which enable local and specific communication between its agents (e.g. [11]) and goes some way to addressing the criticisms in [6].
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