ABSTRACT
We report an experiment where the RoboCup simulation environment was used to study the cognitive advantage provided by signals, which we view as task-specific structures generated in the environment to improve decision-making. We used the passing problem in RoboCup as our test problem and soccer-players’ ‘yells’ of their ‘passability’ as the task-specific signals. We found that yells improved accuracyagents using the yells to decide the best player performed much better than agents computing the best pass themselves. The accuracy advantage derives from the task-specific nature of the yell, and such task-specific structures (signals) are used by organisms across species. From this, we reason that player yells are an instantiation of an implicit, evolved, and adaptive strategy, rather than an explicitly reasoned-out process.
