Experimental investigation of human adaptation to change in agent's strategy through a competitive two-player game

Abstract

We conducted an experimental investigation on human adaptation to change in an agent's strategy through a competitive two-player game. Modeling the process of human adaptation to agents is important for designing intelligent interface agents and adaptive user interfaces that learn a user's preferences and behavior strategy. However, few studies on human adaptation to such an agent have been done. We propose a human adaptation model for a twoplayer game. We prepared an on-line experimental system in which a participant and an agent play a repeated pennymatching game with a bonus round. We then conducted experiments in which different opponent agents (human or robot) change their strategy during the game. The experimental results indicated that, as expected, there is an adaptation phase when a human is confronted with a change in the opponent agent's strategy, and adaptation is faster when a human is competing with robot than with another human.