5. Experimental Analysis

As the members of the community of actors become familiar with the capabilities of other members of the community and the regular problems of coordination that exist in their domain of activity, behavioral conventions begin to emerge. As actors proceed through their joint activities, expectations about behaviors of other actors are conditioned by remindings of prior episodes of coordinated behavior. Situations are never exactly the same as prior ones. Even with a growing sense that one knows how things will proceed, communication and reasoning are needed to maintain coordination between participants as the joint activity develops.

Statistics will be presented throughout this section which compare the performance of the baseline system to the performance of the system when actors are learning conventionalized behaviors. By most measures, the baseline system improves over time because the actors' planners produce plans which are more likely to succeed (due to operator probability trees - see Section 3.3.1). This baseline learning is significantly augmented by the addition of coordinated procedures derived from previously successful joint activities via the techniques discussed in Section 4. For short, in this section, we will refer to this learning as `learning conventions' and the cumulative procedural knowledge acquired by the community as `procedural memory'.