TITLE:
The Game of Life, Decision and Communication
AUTHORS:
Roland Mühlenbernd, Simon Schulz
KEYWORDS:
Game of Life, Signaling Games, Reinforcement Learning
JOURNAL NAME:
Natural Science,
Vol.6 No.13,
August
25,
2014
ABSTRACT: The game of life represents a spatial
environment of cells that live and die according to fixed rules of nature. In the basic variant of the game a cell’s behavior
can be described as reactive and deterministic since each cell’s transition
from an actual state to a subsequent state is straight-forwardly defined by
the rules. Furthermore, it can be shown that the alive cells’ spatial
occupation share of the environment decreases quickly and levels out at a
really small value (around 3%), virtually independent of the initial number of
alive cells. In this study we will show that this occupation share can be
strongly increased if alive cells become more active by making non-deterministic
sacrificial decisions according to their individual positions. Furthermore, we
applied signaling games in
combination with reinforcement learning to show that results can be even more improved if cells learn to signal for
navigating the behavior of neighbor cells. This result stresses the assumption
that individual behavior and local communication supports the optimization of
resourcing and constitute important steps in the evolution of creature and man.