1 The Emergence of Communication through SyntheticEvolution

We describe four series of experiments to study the emergence of inherently meaningful communication by synthetic evolution in a population of artificial agents, which are controlled either by finite state machines or by neural networks. We found that the agents can evolve the ability to use single symbols and, to a limited extent, pairs of symbols exhibiting rudimentary syntax. We show that the communication system evolved by the population can be studied in its own right as an evolving emergent phenomenon, and that the emergent communication systems exhibit some of the richness of natural communication.