'What did you say?' Emergent communication in a multi-agent spatial configuration

This paper reports the results of a multi-agent simulation designed to study the emergence and evolution of symbolic communication. The novelty of this model is that it considers some interactional and spatial constraints to this process that have been disregarded by previous research. The model is used to give an account of the implications of differences in the agents' behaviour, which are embodied in a spatial environment. Two communicational dimensions are identified and four types of communication strategies are simultaneously tested. We use the model to point out some interesting emergent communicational properties when the agents' behaviour is altered by considering those two dimensions.