Evolving Dyadic Strategies for a Cooperative Physical Task

Many cooperative physical tasks require that individuals play specialized roles (e.g., leader-follower). Humans are adept cooperators, negotiating these roles and transitions between roles innately. Yet how roles are delegated and reassigned is not well understood. Using a genetic algorithm, we evolve simulated agents to explore a space of feasible role-switching policies. Applying these switching policies in a cooperative manual task, agents process visual and haptic cues to decide when to switch roles. We then analyze the evolved virtual population for attributes typically associated with cooperation: load sharing and temporal coordination. We find that the best performing dyads exhibit high temporal coordination (anti-synchrony). And in turn, anti-synchrony is correlated to symmetry between the parameters of the cooperative agents. These simulations furnish hypotheses as to how human cooperators might mediate roles in dyadic tasks.

No reviews yet.

No comments yet.