An Empirical Investigation of the Adversarial Activity Model

Multiagent research provides an extensive literature on formal Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) based models describing the notions of teamwork and cooperation, but adversarial and competitive relationships have received very little formal BDI treatment. Moreover, one of the main roles of such models is to serve as design guidelines for the creation of agents, and while there is work illustrating that role in cooperative interaction, there has been no empirical work done to validate competitive BDI models. In this work we use the Adversarial Activity model, a BDI-based model for bounded rational agents that are operating in a general zero-sum environment, as an architectural guideline for building bounded rational agents in two adversarial environments: the Connect-four game (a bilateral environment) and the Risk strategic board game (a multilateral environment). We carry out extensive simulations that illustrate the advantages and limitations of using this model as a design specification.