Steven Damer

MinneTAC Sales Strategies for Supply Chain TAC

We describe two sales strategies used by our agent, MinneTAC, for the 2003 Supply Chain Management Trading Agent Competition (TAC SCM). Both strategies estimate, as the game progresses, the probability of receiving a customer order for different prices and compute the expected profit. We empirically analyze the effect of the discount given by suppliers on orders made the first day of the game, and show that in high-demand games there is a strong correlation between the performance of an agent in the game and the offers it receives from suppliers the first day of the game.

Dispersion and exploration algorithms for robots in unknown environments

We study the problem of dispersing a group of small robots in an unknown environment. The objective is to cover the environment as much as possible while staying within communications range. We assume there is no central control, the environment is unknown and with complex obstacles, the robots operate without any central control, and have only limited communications with other robots and limited sensing capabilities. We present algorithms and validate them experimentally in the Player/Stage simulation environment.

Cooperation without Exploitation between Self-interested Agents

We study how two self-interested agents that play a sequence of randomly generated normal form games, each game played once, can achieve cooperation without being exploited. The agent learns if the opponent is willing to cooperate by tracking the attitude of its opponent, which tells how much the opponent values its own payoff relative to the agent’s payoff. We present experimental results obtained against different types of non-stationary opponents. The results show that a small number of games is sufficient to achieve cooperation.