Genotypic versus Behavioural Diversity for Teams of Programs under the 4-v-3 Keepaway Soccer Task

Abstract

Keepaway soccer is a challenging robot control task that has been widely used as a benchmark for evaluating multi-agent learning systems. The majority of research in this domain has been from the perspective of reinforcement learning (function approximation) and neuroevolution. One of the challenges under multi-agent tasks such as keepaway is to formulate effective mechanisms for diversity maintenance. Indeed the best results to date on this task utilize some form of neuroevolution with genotypic diversity. In this work, a symbiotic framework for evolving teams of programs is utilized with both genotypic and behavioural forms of diversity maintenance considered. Specific contributions of this work include a simple scheme for characterizing genotypic diversity under teams of programs and its comparison to behavioural formulations for diversity under the keepaway soccer task. Unlike previous research concerning diversity maintenance in genetic programming (GP), we are explicitly interested in solutions taking the form of teams of programs.