Spatially distributed naming games

The paper investigates the dynamical properties of spatially distributed naming games. Naming games are interactions between two agents, a speaker and a hearer, in which the speaker identifies an object using a name. Adaptive naming games imply that speaker and hearer update their lexicons to become better in future games. By engaging in adaptive naming games, a coherent shared vocabulary arises through self-organisation in a population of distributed agents. When the agents are spatially distributed, diversity can be shown to arise, and changes, in population contact lead to language changes.This work was financed and carried out at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris.Peer reviewe