A Simulation of Temporally Variant Agent Interaction via Belief Promulgation

This chapter concludes a two part series which examines the emergent properties of multi-agent communication in “temporally asynchronous” environments. Many traditional agent and swarm simulation environments divide time into discrete “ticks” where all entity behavior is synchronized to a master “world clock”. In other words, all agent behavior is governed by a single timer where all agents act and interact within deterministic time intervals. This discrete timing mechanism produces a somewhat restricted and artificial model of autonomous agent interaction. In addition to the behavioral autonomy normally associated with agents, simulated agents should also have “temporal autonomy” in order to interact realistically. This chapter focuses on the exploration of a grid of specially embedded, message-passing agents, where each message represents the communication of a core “belief”. Here, we focus our attention on the how the temporal variance of belief propagation from individual agents induces emergent and dynamic effects on a global population.