Hey Look

The small demonstration above illustrates how agents interacting can bootstrap a shared vocabulary from nothing. It's called the Naming Game and was pioneered by Luc Steels and Vittorio Loreto.

Agents start with no words for the colors, but through repeated communicative interaction, they evolve shared words. Just by choosing random strings and adjusting their vocabularies according to whether those strings are communicatively successful, the populatoin evolves shared names. The graph on the bottom shows success over time for each color "meaning"; success is at first low for all colors, but increases over time, indicating that a shared name for the color is emerging. Read more about the Naming Game.

Speed up time by changing the Interaction Rate, or change the number of agents or colors to see how this changes the rate at which consensus is reached among the agents. The large bar on the right indicates average success over the population for a sliding window of 100 interactions. The "eyes" of the agents indicate their individual success over the same window. When the population has reached consensus on a name for a color, it brightens.