Evaluating Different Genetic Operators in the Testing for Unwanted Emergent Behavior Using Evolutionary Learning of Behavior

We present an experimental comparison of different genetic operators regarding their use in an evolutionary learning method that searches for unwanted emergent behavior in a multi-agent system. The idea of the learning method is to evolve cooperative behavior of a group of so-called attack agents that act in the same environment as the tested agents. The attack agents use action sequences as agent architecture and the quality of a group of such agents is measured by how near their behavior brings the tested agents to show the unwanted behavior. Our experiments within the ARES II rescue simulator with an agent team written by students show that this method is able to find unwanted emergent behavior of the agents. They also show that rather standard genetic operators (on the team level and the agent level) are already sufficient to find this unwanted behavior.