Two Agents Acting as One

Abstract

We consider two agents, each equipped with a controller. When they achieve a joint goal configuration, their coordination can be measured informationally. We show that the amount of coordination that two agents need to configure in a certain way depends on the amount of information they obtain from their environment. Furthermore the environment imposes a coordination pressure on the agents that depends on the size of the environment. In a second scenario we introduce a shared centralized controller which leads to a synchronisation of the agents’ actions for suboptimal policies. However, in the optimal case this intrinsic coordination vanishes and the shared centralized controller can be split into two individual controllers.