[zebrafish]

What I find interesting about this is that the agents naturally become "pacifists". To optimize for survival, they try keep their neighbors at arms length and avoid conflict.

I wonder what would happen if they took the 8 species model that developed niches and introduced some kind of "boredom" feature. Or what might be more interesting is to have the agents produce offspring that stay with them early in life but consume equal resources and see if a "boredom" naturally occurs in the offspring.

I guess given that agents optimizing for survival creates routine, I'm curious where boredom or the desire to explore the world might originate from.

[setr]

I wouldn’t see it as that surprising; most of human history is... not fighting. Its doing exactly that: staying at arms length, because war is expensive (and even victory can leave you weak enough to a third party invasion).

If you want to see combat, increasing the number of actors beyond sustainability will naturally cause fights until the same equilibrium is reached.. add total resource depletion (not just regeneration) to break the equilibrium again

You don’t need anything as complex as boredom to break pacifist behavior; just variable resource constraints will easily do the trick

[gonehome]

I'd guess novelty seeking as a response to boredom is advantageous for learning and therefore being more adaptable to change.

It might be even more of a prerequisite though - babies play, bite, and shake stuff to learn about the world. Maybe without novelty seeking you can't get enough 'training data' to have a functioning generally intelligent neural net in the first place?

[kannanvijayan]

Yeah, the fitness metric was simply survival time, which is diminished as soon as you encounter conflict.

I would expect conflict behaviour to arise if the metric was modified so that say.. defeating another entity acquires the victor some portion of the other entity's current score (e.g. log(score(other-entity))).

[zwaps]

Also, don't we forget all about (evolutionary) game theory?

There are loads of situations where pacifism, or a least tit-for-tat, represents a stable evolutionary equilibrium. This should not be surprising.