Programming agents as a means of capturing self-strategy

In this paper we report results of an extensive evaluation of people's ability to reproduce the strategies they use in simple real-life settings. Having the ability to reliably capture people's strategies in different environments is highly desirable in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). However, as trivial and daily as these strategies are, the process is not straight forward and people often have a different belief of how they act. We describe our experiments in this area, based on the participation of a pool of subjects in four different games with variable complexity and characteristics. The main measure used for determining the closeness between the two types of strategies used is the level of similarity between the actions taken by the participants and those taken by agents they programmed in identical world states. Our results indicate that generally people have the ability to reproduce their game strategies for the class of games we consider. However, this process should be handled carefully as some individuals tend to exhibit a behavior different from the one they program into their agents. The paper evaluates one possible method for enhancing the process of strategy reproduction. Copyright © 2008, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Muhiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.