Research Article Why People Play: Artificial Lives Acquiring Play Instinct to Stabilize Productivity

Copyright © 2012 Shinichi Tamura et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We propose a model to generate a group of artificial lives capable of coping with various environments which is equivalent to a set of requested task, and likely to show that the plays or hobbies are necessary for the group of individuals to maintain the coping capability with various changes of the environment as a whole. This may be an another side of saying that the wide variety of the abilities in the group is necessary, and if the variety in a species decreased, its species will be extinguished. Thus, we show some simulation results, for example, in the world where more variety of abilities are requested in the plays, performance of the whole world becomes stable and improved in spite of being calculated only from job tasks, and can avoid the risk of extinction of the species. This is the good effect of the play. 1