Emergence of Collective Escaping Strategies in Caribou Agents

We propose a wolf-caribou predator-prey system to verify our hypothesis that relatively complex collective escaping behavior may emerge from simple, implicit, locally defined, and therefore scalable interactions between the caribou (prey) agents. Proposing two different communication mechanisms – (i) simple, basic mechanism of implicit interaction, and (ii) explicit communications promoting the awareness of the caribou about the identity of the chased one (i.e., empathy), we present a comparative analysis of the implications of these communication mechanisms on the efficiency of evolution of the emerged collective behavior. We used strongly typed genetic programming with exception handling capabilities to evolve the collective behavior of caribou agents. The experimental results suggest that the empathy facilitates the evolution of collective escaping behavior of the team of caribou agents..