An Iterated Function Systems Approach to Emergence
Douglas A. Hoskins · The MIT Press eBooks · 1995
An approach to action selection in autonomous agents is presented. This approach is motivated by biological examples and the operation of the Random Iteration Algorithm on an Iterated Function System. The approach is illustrated with a simple three-mode behavior that allows a swarm of 200 computational agents to function as a global optimizer on a 30-dimensional multimodal cost function. The behavior of the swarm has functional similarities to the behavior of an evolutionary computation (EC). 1 INTRODUCTION One of the most important concepts in the study of artificial life is emergent behavior (Langton 1990; Steels 1994). Emergent behavior may be defined as the global behaviors of a system of agents, situated in an environment, that require new descriptive categories beyond those that describe the local behavior of each agent. Most biological systems exhibit some form of selforganizing activity that may be called emergent. Intelligence itself appears to be an emergent behavior (Steel...