Collective Behavior Projects

Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

E-mail: [hemelrij|hkunz]@ifi.unizh.ch
Fax: +41-1-635 68 09

Research Summary

Social behaviour in groups of organisms may be described at three levels: the individual, relationships among individuals and social structure of a group. Each level has its own complexity and emergent phenomena. Although this was already acknowledged in 1982 by Hinde, it remained difficult to develop hypotheses to explain social phenomena in this way by theorizing by head alone.
This situation has changed with the development of sophisticated computer tools for devising, among others, multi-agent simulations. The use of such models in so-called 'artificial life' studies has shown how complex phenomena may arise from interactions among simple agents. In the animal kingdom most research has so far been dealing with the intricacies of insect societies. Examples of such studies are, for instance, pheromonal marking and following mechanisms to explain the collective decision making during foraging by ants to exploit food sources that are nearest to the nest. Further, variation in the distribution of food is shown to be a sufficient explanation of the different raiding patterns in the enormous colonies of army ants (Deneubourg & Goss 1989), and simple rules may underlie comb-building (Theraulaz & Bonabeau 1995). Simultaneously, there is also a growing interest in emergent social behaviour among economists (Epstein & Axtell 1996), politocologists and social scientists (Gilbert 1995).
In our 'collective behaviour projects' we use computer models and robotic implementations for gaining insight in the emergence of social behavioural patterns. We do not confine ourselves to single taxa, but are interested in artificial agents and in real organisms of any kind.

References
Deneubourg, J. L. & Goss, S. (1989) Collective patterns and decision-making. Ethology, ecology and evolution 1, 295-311.
Epstein, J. M. & Axtell, R. (1996) Growing artificial societies. Social science from bottom up. Complex adapative systems. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Gilbert, N. (1995) Emergence in social simulation. In Artificial societies (ed. N. Gilbert & R. Conte), pp. 144-156. London: UCL Press.
Hinde, R. A. (1982) Ethology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Theraulaz, G. & Bonabeau, E. (1995) Modelling the collective building of complex architectures in social insects with lattice swarms. Journal of theoretical Biology 177, 381-400.

Projects and People

Self-organisation and social behaviour in real animals and in a virtual world
Charlotte Hemelrijk
Flocking robot project
Hanspeter Kunz
Coordination among artificial agents and real creatures
Charlotte Hemelrijk Hanspeter Kunz
Selected Publications

Hemelrijk, C. K. (1999) An individual-oriented model on the emergence of despotic and egalitarian societies.
Proceedings of the Royal Society London B: Biological Sciences. 266, 361-369.

Hemelrijk, C. K. (1998) Spatial centrality of dominants without positional preference.
In Artificial Life VI, vol. 6 (ed. C. Adami, R. Belew, H. Kitano & C. Taylor), pp. 307-315. Los Angeles, USA: MIT-Press.

Hemelrijk, C. K. (2000) Social phenomena emerging by self-organisation in a competitive, virtual world ("DomWorld").
In Learning to behave. Workshop II: Internalising knowledge (ed. K. Jokinen, D. Heylen & A. Nijholt), pp. 11-19. Ieper, Belgium., July, 2000, Venice, Italy
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