Evolving team behaviours in environments of varying difficulty

Abstract

This paper investigates how varying the difficulty of the environment can affect the evolution of team behaviour in a combative game setting. The difficulty of the environment is altered by varying the perceptual capabilities of the agents in the game. The behaviours of the agents are evolved using a genetic program. These experiments show that the level of difficulty of the environment does have an impact on the evolvability of effective team behaviours; i.e. simpler environments are more conducive to the evolution of effective team behaviours than more difficult environments. In addition, the experiments show that no one best solution from any environment is optimal for all environments. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.