Slime-agents adapt to changing goals
Channel: Stefano Mariani
Date: 2023-09-20

Selected video showing a NetLogo simulation where "slime-agents" learn (via independent Q-learning) to deposit and follow pheromone as a way to communicate their presence with the changing goal of first clustering together then scattering around.
Slime-agents already learnt how to cluster (left side) but are now rewarded for scattering. At the end of the learning process (right side) they changed their policies to not cluster (at least not so tightly) anymore.
Notice that the task is particularly challenging as slime-agents have no specific action to move away from pheromone.

The goal of the simulation is to show that learnt communication (pheromone based) is easily adaptive to changing goals (we only toggled negative and positive rewards in the reward function).