Cooperation and Collaboration

In this project we were interested in the evolution of collaboration. The idea is that group level selection can explain how organisms evolve to collaborate, while individual selection doesn’t. My main problem with this idea is that in my opinion group level selection is already explained by inclusive fitness theory, and I don’t think that we should think of evolution happening on different levels. However, here we tested if agents (red triangles) can push away obstacles (yellow blocks) to reach a food source (striped object in the middle). Agents can only move objects together, an agent alone is incapable of doing so. Here you see the result of a successful evolutionary run where we rewarded the entire team regardless of the individuals efforts. What you can observe is that one of the agents to the left is acting entirely selfless, once it feeds, it moved over to the right side just to help another agent.

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