Communication without dedicated signalling channels. A general finding?

The central finding of Quinn (2001) was that communication can evolve in an evolutionary robotics context without the use of dedicated signalling channels. Quinn simulated fairly realistic robotic agents controlled by neural networks and equipped with proximity sensors and wheels for locomotion.  The agents were set a coordinated movement task (i.e., to move their combined centre of mass as far as possible in a limited time frame).  Non-coordinated strategies do very poorly at this task, but coordination was not trivial to achieve, as the agents had no pre-given way of signalling to each other. Evolutionary runs revealed that coordinated overall behaviour could in fact emerge from a dance-like movement pattern that allowed the two agents to spontaneously establish “leader” and “follower” roles. Quinn’s result is very exciting because it shows the potential for ALife models to look at the origin of communication from genuinely non-communicative contexts. Other models that look at the conditions for the stability of a signalling system over a pre-defined signalling channel can only really refer to the evolutionary maintenance of communication rather than its beginnings. Although other evolutionary robotics researchers have referenced Quinn’s result, this has typically been in the context of interpreting some evolved behaviour in their own experiments. The importance of Quinn’s result for cognitive theorists interested in the evolution of language and social intelligence was acknowledged by Kirby et al. (2002) but this side of the work has not been pursued. Our project involves asking whether Quinn’s findings are general. In other words, we have successfully replicated Quinn’s central result but without using the particular simulation framework that he employed. Most of the results of our experiment match Quinn’s results and therefore it is suggested that the emergence of communication from non-communicative origins is likely to be a common evolutionary adaptation to niches that involve the coordination of cooperative behaviour.

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