An infection-based mechanism in large convention spaces

Abstract

Regulating the behavior of autonomous agents is necessary to solve coordination problems and minimize conflicts in multi-agent systems (MAS). It is well known that in practice centralized approaches are not viable to accomplish this. Thus, distributed regulating mechanisms, such as mechanisms for the emergence of social conventions, are highly needed. Nevertheless, existing studies have not focused on determining how the size of the convention space may influence the emergence of conventions. To that end in this paper we apply a mechanism for the distributed, dynamic emergence of social conventions, to a problem with a large convention space: finding a common vocabulary (lexicon) for the agents of a MAS that allows them to perfectly communicate with neither ambiguity nor inconsistencies. Therefore, we empirically show that the mechanism can cope with large convention spaces. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.