NEW TIES year 2 review NEW TIES = New and Emergent World models Through Individual, Evolutionary and Social learning

Timetable – 10.20Coordinator’s opening and summary – 10.45WP1 presentation: scenarios and challenges – 11.15WP2 presentation: evolving NEW TIES agents – Coffee break – 12.00WP3 presentation: language evolution and communication – WP4 presentation: data analysis tools – WP5 presentation: distributed NEW TIES platform – Lunch break – 14.20WP6 presentation: integration & evaluation – Questions and answers session – Review panel: deliberation (incl. coffee), project participants: coffee break – Review panels feedback to project participants

What is NEW TIES? An artificial agent world with Interesting scenarios / challenges Emergence engine =  Evolutionary learning  Individual learning  Social learning Language evolution — link with IL & SL Detection of world models (culture, data mining) Large scale: many & complex agents, long simulations

Main objectives from Annex I 1. To develop an artificial society with an emergent culture. 2. To realise a powerful “emergence engine” as a combination of individual learning, evolutionary learning, and social learning. 3. To develop, evaluate, and use a range of social learning mechanisms that allow sharing knowledge with other members of the population. Essential & distinguishing feature: enormous scale-up

NEW TIES questions (examples) Can a NT society learn “ecologically correct” behavior? Can individual learning compensate for bad genes? And social learning? Can the agents develop language and share info through it? Can we understand it? Will telepathy work as social learning mechanism? What culture will emerge? Can we start a (p2p) SIG where users compete by their “home-brewed tribes” in a NT world? Could we win such a competition?

Modular Design Environment Agents Language New Ties Virtual Machine Visualisers Data Miners Learning

Project structure (tech part) WP5: p2p infrastructure WP1: environment & challenges WP3: language, communication, cooperation WP2: agents and learning Simulated world WP4: emerging world models WP6: integration and evaluation

Year 2 in brief Major code restructuring  effective start of NEW TIES experiments in April-May 2006 Experiments:  Evolutionary learning:  simple world (calibration) and  poison world (challenge solved)  Language evolution: collective lexicon developed Development:  Scenario generator  World model detectors, data analysis (user in the loop!)  Distributed platform

Main achievements per WP WP1: Scenario generator and map viewer WP2: Evolutionary learning in NEW TIES WP3: Language evolution in NEW TIES WP4: Interactive data analysis tools WP5: Distributed platform beta, incl. historical data module WP6: Complete code restructuring WP7: Release of the NEW TIES platform

Biggest challenges at the moment Evolution remains the only learning mechanism, i.e., no IL and no SL Evolved language (components) not used by agents for info exchange or as building blocks in IL Simulation times are too long No challenging and appealing scenario solved NEW TIES must become more than another ALife project