The Evolutionary Emergence of Socially Intelligent Agents. Workshop on Socially Situated Intelligence at SAB'98

Evolutionary emergence is the key to generating increasingly socially intelligent agents. In order to generate agents with novel behaviors beyond our manual design capability, long-term incremental evolution with continuing emergence within a social environment is called for. Purely artificial selection models are argued to be fundamentally inadequate for this calling and a new natural selection system containing simple virtual agents is presented. Each agent is controlled by a genetically determined neural network- controllers suited to both incremental evolution and the goal of intelligent behaviors. Resulting evolutionary emergent social behaviors are reported alongside their neural correlates. In one example, the collective behavior of one species clearly provides a selective force which is overcome by another species, demonstrating the perpetuation of evolutionary emergence via naturally-arising social coevolution