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Andreas Kalaitzakis

Friday, November 29, 2024

Cultural evolution of knowledge within cognitively-restricted agents: accuracy, specialization and benefits

Abstract:
This thesis explores how the presence of several tasks affects the cultural evolution of knowledge within agent societies. Previous findings show that when agents coordinate over a single shared task, this improves their accuracy. We build upon these by investigating how coordinating over additional tasks influences the cultural evolution of knowledge, particularly when the cognitive resources of agents are limited.

Our goal is to determine whether the cultural evolution of knowledge guarantees: (1) equidistribution of collective resources among different tasks, and (2) improvement of a society’s knowledge across all tasks. To that end, we propose a framework allowing for examining what pushes agents to specialize and how this specialization affects both individual agents and agent societies.

Our findings reveal several key insights: First, agents improve their knowledge on one task by undertaking additional tasks. Second, while assigning different tasks to different agents benefits their societies, it is not what triggers agent specialization. On the contrary, specialization emerges when agents allocate limited cognitive resources to these tasks. Third, while temporarily detrimental to their knowledge correctness, forgetting randomly selected knowledge brings long-term benefits when agents are assigned a single task. Lastly, when agents specializing in different tasks interact, one task will gradually monopolize the collectively available resources, causing the entire society to specialize in the same task.

These results improve our understanding of how the formation, evolution, and prevalence of specialized knowledge affect individual agents and agent societies.

Date and place

Friday, November 29, 2024 at 2:00 PM
Grand Amphithéâtre, NRIA

Jury members

Jérôme Euzenat
(Directeur de thèse), Directeur de Recherche, Centre INRIA, Université Grenoble Alpes
Olivier Boissier
(Rapporteur) Professeur, École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne
Zahia Guessoum
(Rapporteure) Maîtresse de Conférences (HDR), Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
Julie Dugdale
(Examinatrice) Professeure des Universités, Université Grenoble Alpes
Maxime Morge
(Examinateur) Professeur des Universités, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

Submitted on December 7, 2024

Updated on December 7, 2024