This project is on how cumulative culture can spontaneously emerge in agents who are bound by just four simple rules:
- Goal direction: Having a sense of (roughly) where the goal is.
- Social proximity: Aiming to stay close to other agents by moving in the direction they are expected to be next.
- Route memory: Agents remember landmarks along the route, and aim to follow along these landmarks. Their memory precision improves over several journeys.
- Continuity: To avoid eratic/jerky movements, agents aim to move mostly in the direction that they are currently travelling in.
Despite the lack of explicit social transmission or evaluation of outcomes, pairs of agents with generational turnover show gradual improvements in route efficiency (they converge on the direct line between start and goal). For more information, please read the manuscript on arXiv (linked below).
Dalmaijer, E.S. (pre-print). Cumulative culture spontaneously emerges in artificial navigators who are social and memory-guided. arXiv, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2206.06281
Data generated through the code in this repository can be downloaded from Zenodo:
Dalmaijer, E.S. (2024). Cumulative culture in artificial navigators [Data set]. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.6944185