Optimal coordination of resources: A solution from reinforcement learning

Abstract

Efficient allocation is important in nature and human society, where individuals frequently compete for limited resources. The Minority Game (MG) is perhaps the simplest toy model to address this issue. However, most previous solutions assume that the strategies are provided a priori and static, failing to capture their adaptive nature. Here, we introduce the reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm to MG, where individuals adjust decisions based on accumulated experience and expected rewards dynamically. We find that this RL framework achieves optimal resource coordination when individuals balance the exploitation of experience with random exploration. Yet, the imbalanced strategies of the two lead to suboptimal partial coordination or even anti-coordination. Our mechanistic analysis reveals a symmetry-breaking in action preferences at the optimum, offering a fresh solution to the MG and new insights into the resource allocation problem.

15 pages, 13 figures, 1 table, comments are appreciated

References in corpus (14)

• Coevolutionary games - a mini review
• Nonequilibrium Physics in Biology
• Randomness enhances cooperation: a resonance type phenomenon in evolutionary games
• Language-based game theory in the age of artificial intelligence
• The Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem and Resource Utilization
• From Outcome-Based to Language-Based Preferences
• Evolution of cooperation in the public goods game with Q-learning
• Self-organized Boolean game on networks
• The Stable Marriage Problem: an Interdisciplinary Review from the Physicist's Perspective
• Artificial intelligence meets minority game: toward optimal resource allocation
• Emergence of Cooperation in Two-agent Repeated Games with Reinforcement Learning
• Decoding trust: A reinforcement learning perspective
• On the transition to efficiency in Minority Games
• Generating functional analysis of minority games with inner product strategy definitions

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Emergence of anti-coordinated patterns in snowdrift game by reinforcement learning
• Catalytic evolution of cooperation in a population with behavioural bimodality