Interactive Restless Multi-armed Bandit Game and Swarm Intelligence Effect
This addresses the problem of optimizing learning strategies in multi-agent systems for researchers in game theory and AI, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing restless bandit models.
The paper investigates the emergence of swarm intelligence in an interactive restless multi-armed bandit game, showing that social learning is optimal under specific conditions (e.g., payoff change probability p_c and innovation size n_I) and confirming this with a lab experiment involving 67 subjects.
We obtain the conditions for the emergence of the swarm intelligence effect in an interactive game of restless multi-armed bandit (rMAB). A player competes with multiple agents. Each bandit has a payoff that changes with a probability $p_{c}$ per round. The agents and player choose one of three options: (1) Exploit (a good bandit), (2) Innovate (asocial learning for a good bandit among $n_{I}$ randomly chosen bandits), and (3) Observe (social learning for a good bandit). Each agent has two parameters $(c,p_{obs})$ to specify the decision: (i) $c$, the threshold value for Exploit, and (ii) $p_{obs}$, the probability for Observe in learning. The parameters $(c,p_{obs})$ are uniformly distributed. We determine the optimal strategies for the player using complete knowledge about the rMAB. We show whether or not social or asocial learning is more optimal in the $(p_{c},n_{I})$ space and define the swarm intelligence effect. We conduct a laboratory experiment (67 subjects) and observe the swarm intelligence effect only if $(p_{c},n_{I})$ are chosen so that social learning is far more optimal than asocial learning.