MSc project

Learning Behaviours of Autonomous Agents

Benoit Isaac

On this page you can find:
  1. My dissertation :  Postcript File, High Quality, 6.5 Mo (for double side printing)   or PDF, lower quality, 1.8 Mo but with hyperlinks and bookmarks;
  2. The documentation generated by Javadoc, with the source code;
  3. The program itself, with instructions on how to test it - Quick download (requires JRE > 1.4.2) : simuLCS.jar , 210 Ko.

Documentation

The documentation has been generated using Javadoc, and it is available here. It is linked with the source code, so for each class you can see the source code by clicking on the appropriate link (see screenshot below).
Where to find the link to the source code

Testing the Program

The program is available as a Java archive (jar), so you need to install the Java Run-Time Environment on your machine to test it. It was tested with the JRE 1.4.2, but more recent versions should work as well. You can obtain the JRE from Sun, for example.

The Java Archive can be downloaded here : simuLCS.jar
NB: The program may slightly differ from the screenshots in the thesis because we made several small improvements to the GUI so that the system can be tried more easily by examiners.

The resolution of your screen should be at least 1024x768 to obtain a normal display.
Once you have downloaded the jar file, the program can be launched ususally by double-clicking on it or by the command :
java -jar simuLCS.jar



This should run the display, with by default the Experiment 3 described in the thesis. Run the experiment by clicking on "Start", type the base name of the data file (say myfile) and watch the learning system working by clicking on the Tab "Watch Learning" and selecting the Agent 2. You should be able to see the real behaviour and the expected behaviour, with usually more and more "-EXACT-" rules over time. Click on "Finish" to stop the experiment.
Then you can run : gnuplot myfile.gp to obtain a Postcript Graph of the Average Reward. (This requires gnuplot to be installed on your machine, see www.gnuplot.info) .
The file myfile.rules recorded the population of rules inside the LCS at the end of the experiment.

You need to click on "Reset" to start another experiment. You can add/remove several Agents and change their behaviours (by adding/removing classifiers) ; or add an AgentInteractive and some AgentDucks to check the flocking behaviour.

Finally, you can run experiment 3 without the display by adding an argument to the command line, namely the base name of the output files, ie. :
 java -jar simuLCS.jar myfile
This will launch successively 3 experiments (Experiment 3, one Agent 2, one Agent Ra and the Arena) until 50 000 time steps. Run gnuplot myfile*.gp  to obtain all the Postscript graphs.


For any question or remark, please send me an e-mail to the address in the thesis, or use my contact form.


Benoit Isaac - Last Modified 25 August 2005