The Evolution of Simple Affective States in Multi-Agent Environments

Contents

We propose a research strategy to study the evolution of affective states and analyze the requirements for simulated environments to be appropriate for experiments with affective agent architectures. We present the simulation model and agent architecture used in our experiments to demonstrate that (1) primitive emotional states (such as "fear" and "anger") and primitive motivational states (such as "hunger" and "thirst") can play an important role in the control and coordination of agents in agent societies, and (2) such states are very likely to evolve (in certain environments).