Efficiency of goal-oriented communicating agents in different graph topologies: A study with Internet crawlers

To what extent does the communication make a goal-oriented community efficient in different topologies? In order to gain insight into this problem, we study the influence of learning method as well as that of the topology of the environment on the communication efficiency of crawlers in quest of novel information in different topics on the Internet. Individual crawlers employ selective learning, function approximation-based reinforcement learning (RL), and their combination. Selective learning, in effect, modifies the starting URL lists of the crawlers, whilst RL alters the URL orderings. Real data have been collected from the web and scale-free worlds, scale-free small world (SFSW), and random world environments (RWEs) have been created by link reorganization. In our previous experiments [ Zs. Palotai, Cs. Farkas, A. Lőrincz, Is selection optimal in scale-free small worlds?, ComPlexUs 3 (2006) 158–168], the crawlers searched for novel, genuine documents and direct communication was not possible. Herein, our finding is reproduced: selective learning performs the best and RL the worst in SFSW, whereas the combined, i.e., selective learning coupled with RL is the best—by a slight margin—in scale-free worlds. This effect is demonstrated to be more pronounced when the crawlers search for different topic-specific documents: the relative performance of the combined learning algorithm improves in all worlds, i.e., in SFSW, in SFW, and in RWE. If the tasks are more complex and the work sharing is enforced by the environment then the combined learning algorithm becomes at least equal, even superior to both the selective and the RL algorithms in most cases, irrespective of the efficiency of communication. Furthermore, communication improves the performance by a large margin and adaptive communication is advantageous in the majority of the cases.