The role of Surprise, Curiosity and Hunger on Exploration of Unknown Environments Populated with Entities

This paper describes an approach based on affect to the problem of exploring unknown environments populated with entities by agents. To this end, a multi-agent system based on the notion of affect as well as on the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model was used. The affective component of the agents is confined to the motivations that are usually associated to exploratory behavior: surprise, curiosity and hunger. An experiment that evaluates the role of these motivations in exploration performance is presented