A lesson in unit AI, taught by bacteria

Imagine tactical artificial intelligence in which independent agents send signals to nearby allies about the presence of an outsider. And they send signals to all agents. These signals offer a proposed group cooperative activity, and the agents seek a quorum, a sufficient agreement among the agents to take a costly behavior that would help the group. The induced behavior might be to gas a massive enemy or bond together into an ad hoc defense barrier.

You've just imagined what bacteria do. Bacteria talk to each other, inducing a quorum for cooperative behavior, that makes them seem to be a temporary multicellular organism, yet each agent is non specialized and not driven by a leader. Spontaneous cooperation.

Imagine units in a game that behave by such intelligence. It doesn't sound so far fetched; aren't there already some examples? In theory, a lifeform in Conway's Game of Life could send flyers to another lifeform in response to an environment, but the board size would be enormous and so the search space for those configurations that communicate is intractable to design techniques. Will Wright employs cellular automata in SimCity to propagate local conditions. For example of emergent cooperation, did SimAnt have ants cooperate from the bottom-up, beyond pheronome trails?

Biochemists use this knowledge to explore disruptions of bacterial cooperation, through jamming their communication, with agonist and antagonist chemicals.

In a tactical game, a designer could construct counters to enemy collaboration in a bottom-up approach by launching jammers, which basically spam antagonist messages. Are there games out there employing bottom-up communication jamming?

In some sense, there may be a waste of computational resources to simulate communication between units, because the computer can cheat. The computer has access to all the units and can emulate communication through top-down broadcasting, or jumping from the intention to the result without having the model the details of signal propagation. I seem to recall from some interview, that Sid Meier's Civilization cheats in a fashion related to signal propagation and faction knowledge. For a game, cheating the simulation is desirable to the point of freeing up computational resources for other threads that entertain. Yet it does seem to me that there are entertaining mechanisms around this area of emergent cooperation, inspired by biochemistry.

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