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A Detailed Analysis of a Multi-agent Diverse Team

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Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems IX (COIN 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8386))

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Abstract

In an open system we can have many different kinds of agents. However, it is a challenge to decide which agents to pick when forming multi-agent teams. In some scenarios, agents coordinate by voting continuously. When forming such teams, should we focus on the diversity of the team or on the strength of each member? Can a team of diverse (and weak) agents outperform a uniform team of strong agents? We propose a new model to address these questions. Our key contributions include: (i) we show that a diverse team can overcome a uniform team and we give the necessary conditions for it to happen; (ii) we present optimal voting rules for a diverse team; (iii) we perform synthetic experiments that demonstrate that both diversity and strength contribute to the performance of a team; (iv) we show experiments that demonstrate the usefulness of our model in one of the most difficult challenges for Artificial Intelligence: Computer Go.

This paper is an extended version of [1]. We include here more empirical results: while in [1] there are results only for white, here we also study in Sect. 4.2 teams playing as black, hence showing a more general result. Moreover, in [1] we analyze the agents only using our proposed model, but here (again in Sect. 4.2) we also analyze them using classical voting models, emphasizing the importance of our new model. In addition, we present in Sect. 5 a new study by a human expert of some games from our experiments, in order to better understand why a team of diverse agents is able to overcome a uniform team of strong agents. Finally, we have new discussions in the Conclusion.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by MURI grant W911NF-11-1-0332.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Leandro Soriano Marcolino, Chao Zhang, Albert Xin Jiang & Milind Tambe

Authors
  1. Leandro Soriano Marcolino
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  2. Chao Zhang
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  3. Albert Xin Jiang
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  4. Milind Tambe
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Leandro Soriano Marcolino .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

    Tina Balke

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Frank Dignum

  3. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    M. Birna van Riemsdijk

  4. Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

    Amit K. Chopra

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Marcolino, L.S., Zhang, C., Jiang, A.X., Tambe, M. (2014). A Detailed Analysis of a Multi-agent Diverse Team. In: Balke, T., Dignum, F., van Riemsdijk, M., Chopra, A. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems IX. COIN 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8386. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07314-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07314-9_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07313-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07314-9

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