Re: is communication a requirement to collaborate?

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.
-- 
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Martijn van Otterlo              Tel:    (31)(53) 489 4111
TKI, Dept. of Computer Science,  Fax:    (31)(53) 489 3503
Twente University                e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Postbus 217, 7500 AE Enschede,   Web: http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~otterlo
The Netherlands
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