STAI CDT PhD student Dylan Cope presented the paper ‘Mimicry and the Emergence of Cooperative Communication’ at The International Conference for Artificial Life (ALIFE). The conference took place in July in Copenhagen, Denmark. The theme for this years conference was ‘Exploring new frontiers‘ and was inspired by the ancient traditions of the Vikings to travel to new and strange lands and discover new cultures and traditions.
The paper focuses on cooperative agents that learn or evolve to communicate. As Dylan explains, “This is particularly hard to do because of what I call the “chicken-and-egg” problem. If two agents do not already have an agreed upon way of communicating, it is very unlikely that they happen upon one by chance. At this point, a speaker has no incentive to send a signal to a receiver unless the receiver already does something useful upon hearing the message. And conversely, the receiver has no reason to change its behaviour according to the messages sent by the speaker, as they do not yet carry any useful information. I hypothesised that “mimicry” could be a means for bootstrapping the evolution of communication. More specifically, that the capacity for a speaker to mimic a preexisting useful signal in the environment could alleviate the chick-and-egg problem. Through mathematical and empirical investigations, I showed that this is the case”.
Dylan experienced Copenhagen as a great backdrop for the conference. Dylan and his fellow attendees were provided with many ways to enjoy the city throughout the conference, including a canal tour and reception at a beautiful gallery, with access to the exhibitions.
The paper was co-authored with Peter McBurney, and you can read it here: Mimicry and the Emergence of Cooperative Communication | Artificial Life Conference Proceedings | MIT Press.
You can also find Dylan’s slides from the presentation here: Mimicry and the Emergence of Communication – Dylan R. Cope – PhD Student in Artificial Intelligence.