Wednesday 10 February 2010

The Minimal Naming Game

This is the Minimal Naming Game Algorithm from Puglisi et al. (2008). I point out two Heuristics that affect the agent's ability to acquire two langauge systems.

There is a population of agents, each with a partitioning of the perceptual space called categories. Each category has a list of associated words. Each agent has a minimum perceptual difference threshold dmin , below which stimuli appear the same. At each time step:

1. Two individuals are chosen at random to be the speaker and the listener.

2. They both have access to a scene containing M stimuli. The stimuli must
be perceptually distinguishable by the agents (perceptual distance ≤ dmin ).

3. The speaker selects a topic and discriminates it in the following way:
• Each stimulus is assigned to a perceptual category
• If one or more other stimuli are assigned to the same category as the topic, the agent splits its perceptual categories so that each stimulus belongs to only one perceptual category.
• The new partitions inherit the associated words of the old partition.
Heuristic A: Each new partition is given a new, unique name.

4. The speaker transmits a word that it associates with the topic to the listener.
If it has no words associated with the category, it creates a new one. If it has more than one word associated, it transmits the one that was last used in a successful communication.

5. The hearer receives the word and finds all categories which have the associated word and which identify one of the stimuli in the scene. Then:
• If there are no such categories, the agent does nothing.
• If there is one such category, the agent points to the associated stimulus.
• If there is more than one such category, the agent points randomly at an associated stimulus.

6. The hearer discriminates the scene, as above.

7. The speaker reveals the topic to the listener.

8. If the hearer did not point to the topic, the communication is a failure. The hearer adds the transmitted word to the category discriminating the topic.

9. If the hearer pointed to the topic, the communication is a success.
Heuristic B: Both agents delete all other words but the transmitted one from the inventory of the category discriminating the topic.

No comments:

Post a Comment