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1. The Hero's Dilemma: Survival Advantages of Intention Perception in Virtual Agent Games

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG52621.2021.9619071  

   Maina-Kilaas, Amani R. ; Montanez, George D. ; Hom, Cynthia ; Ginta, Kevin ; Lay, Cindy ( August 2021 , 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG))

   Conjecturing that an agent's ability to perceive the intentions of others can increase its chances of survival, we introduce a simple game, the Hero's Dilemma, which simulates interactions between two virtual agents to investigate whether an agent's ability to detect the intentional stance of a second agent provides a measurable survival advantage. We test whether agents able to make decisions based on the perceived intention of an adversarial agent have advantages over agents without such perception, but who instead rely on a variety of different game-playing strategies. In the game, an agent must decide whether to remain hidden or attack an often more powerful agent based on the perceived intention of the other agent. We compare the survival rates of agents with and without intention perception, and find that intention perception provides significant survival advantages and is the most successful strategy in the majority of situations tested.
2. The Predator’s Purpose: Intention Perception in Simulated Agent Environments

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CEC45853.2021.9504885  

   Maina-Kilaas, Amani R. ; Hom, Cynthia ; Ginta, Kevin ; Montanez, George D. ( June 2021 , 2021 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC))

   We evaluate the benefits of intention perception, the ability of an agent to perceive the intentions and plans of others, in improving a software agent's survival likelihood in a simulated virtual environment. To model intention perception, we set up a multi-agent predator and prey model, where the prey agents search for food and the predator agents seek to eat the prey. We then analyze the difference in average survival rates between prey with intention perception-knowledge of which predators are targeting them-and those without. We find that intention perception provides significant survival advantages in almost all cases tested, agreeing with other recent studies investigating intention perception in adversarial situations and environmental danger assessment.
3. Cell Aggregation and Aerobic Respiration Are Important for Zymomonas mobilis ZM4 Survival in an Aerobic Minimal Medium

   https://doi.org/10.1128/AEM.00193-19  

   Jones-Burrage, Sara E. ; Kremer, Timothy A. ; McKinlay, James B. ; Müller, Volker ( May 2019 , Applied and Environmental Microbiology)

   ABSTRACT Zymomonas mobilis produces ethanol from glucose near the theoretical maximum yield, making it a potential alternative to the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae for industrial ethanol production. A potentially useful industrial feature is the ability to form multicellular aggregates called flocs, which can settle quickly and exhibit higher resistance to harmful chemicals than single cells. While spontaneous floc-forming Z. mobilis mutants have been described, little is known about the natural conditions that induce Z. mobilis floc formation or about the genetic factors involved. Here we found that wild-type Z. mobilis forms flocs in response to aerobic growth conditions but only in a minimal medium. We identified a cellulose synthase gene cluster and a single diguanylate cyclase that are essential for both floc formation and survival in a minimal aerobic medium. We also found that NADH dehydrogenase 2, a key component of the aerobic respiratory chain, is important for survival in a minimal aerobic medium, providing a physiological role for this enzyme, which has previously been found to be disadvantageous in a rich aerobic medium. Supplementation of the minimal medium with vitamins also promoted survival but did not inhibit floc formation. IMPORTANCE The bacterium Zymomonas mobilis is best known for its anaerobicmore »fermentative lifestyle, in which it converts glucose into ethanol at a yield surpassing that of yeast. However, Z. mobilis also has an aerobic lifestyle, which has confounded researchers with its attributes of poor growth, accumulation of toxic acetic acid and acetaldehyde, and respiratory enzymes that are detrimental for aerobic growth. Here we show that a major Z. mobilis respiratory enzyme and the ability to form multicellular aggregates, called flocs, are important for survival, but only during aerobic growth in a medium containing a minimum set of nutrients required for growth. Supplements, such as vitamins or yeast extract, promote aerobic growth and, in some cases, inhibit floc formation. We propose that Z. mobilis likely requires aerobic respiration and floc formation in order to survive in natural environments that lack protective factors found in supplements such as yeast extract.« less
4. Sensory perception plays a larger role in foraging efficiency than does heavy-tailed movement strategies.

   https://doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2019.02.015  

   LaScala-Gruenewald, DE ; Mehta, RS ; Denny, MW ( January 2019 , Ecological modelling)

   Animals must balance their rates of energetic intake and expenditure while foraging. Several mathematical models have been put forward as energetically optimal foraging strategies when the food environment is sparse (i.e., the distance between food patches in the environment is much larger than the distance from which the forager can perceive food). In particular, Lévy walks with a power law exponent approaching 1 are considered optimal for destructive foragers. However, these models have yet to explore the role of sensory perception in foraging success as the distance between food patches approaches the distance from which the forager can perceive food. Here, we used an agent-based modeling approach to address this question. Our results concur that lower values of the power law exponent (i.e. values approaching 1) result in the most food found, but in contrast to previous studies, we note that, in many cases, lower exponents are not optimal when we consider food found per unit distance traveled. For example, higher values of the exponent resulted in comparable or higher foraging success relative to lower values when the forager's range of sensory perception was restricted to an angle±30° from its current heading. In addition, we find that sensory perception hasmore »a larger effect on foraging success than the power law exponent. These results suggest that a deeper examination of how animals perceive food sources from a distance may affect longstanding assumptions regarding the optimality of Lévy walk foraging patterns, and lend support to the developing theoretical shift towards models that place increasing emphasis on how organisms interact with their environments.« less
5. The Gopher Grounds: Testing the Link between Structure and Function in Simple Machines

   https://doi.org/10.5220/0010900900003116  

   Kamath, Anshul ; Zhao, Jiayi ; Grisanti, Nick ; Montanez, George ( January 2022 , Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence)

   Does structure dictate function and can function be reliably inferred from structure? Previous work has shown that an artificial agent’s ability to detect function (e.g., lethality) from structure (e.g., the coherence of traps) can confer measurable survival advantages. We explore the link between structure and function in simple combinatorial machines, using genetic algorithms to generate traps with structure (coherence) and no function (no lethality), generate traps with function and no structure, and generate traps with both structure and function. We explore the characteristics of the algorithmically generated traps, examine the genetic algorithms’ ability to produce structure, function, and their combination, and investigate what resources are needed for the genetic algorithms to reliably succeed at these tasks. We find that producing lethality (function) is easier than producing coherence (structure) and that optimizing for one does not reliably produce the other.