Are Many Reactive Agents Better Than a Few Deliberative Ones?

Abstract

Problem solvers fall along a wide spectrum ranging from highly deliberative to highly reactive. Highly deliberative systems are able to design optimally efficient solutions to problems, but they require complete world models and consume inordinate computational resources. Reactive systems move in real time but cannot guarantee efficient solutions. They are also subject to looping behavior. One way to generate incrementally more efficient solutions is to be incrementally more deliberative, e.g., to increase the amount of mental search between actions. This paper presents an alternative method for generating more efficient solutions: increasing the number of reactive agents simultaneously attacking a given problem. This method provides a second, orthogonal degree of freedom . We find that in many domains , increasing agents is dramatically superior to increasing single-agent deliberativeness. This is because solution quality improves rapidly as more reactive agents are added, but search time only increases linearly. This contrasts with adding more deliberativeness, which incurs exponentially increasing time costs. Ample empirical evidence is presented to support our conclusions.