Collective Memory Search: Exploiting an Information Center for Exploration

Complex group behavior arises in social insects colonies as the integration of the actions of simple and redundant individual insects [ Adler and Gordon, 1992, Oster and Wilson, 1978 ] . Furthermore, the colony can act as an information center to expedite foraging [ Brown, 1989 ] . We apply these lessons from natural systems to model collective action and memory in a computational agent society. Collective action can expedite search in combinatorial optimization problems [ Dorigo et al., 1996 ] . Collective memory can improve learning in multiagent systems [ Garland and Alterman, 1996 ] . We integrate the simplicity of collective action with the pattern detection of collective memory to significantly improve both the gathering and processing of knowledge. We investigate the augmentation of distributed search in genetic programming based systems with collective memory. Four models of collective memory search are defined based on the interaction of the search agents and the process agen..