III.Cooperative Behavior Objectives The objectives of this challenge is to check how the most fundamental cooperative skill (passing a ball between two players) can be acquired, and to evaluate merits and demerits of realized skills using the standard tasks. The challenge (III) focuses on a basic skill of cooperative behavior between two agents while the challenges (I) and (II) focus on the basic skills of one single agent even though the environment includes other agents (possible opponents). If the challenge (I) and (II) are successfully achieved, passing the ball between two players might become easy. That is, a combination of passing and receiving skills. However, from a viewpoint of cooperative behaviors, there might be more issues. Technical Issues In addition to issue in the challenge (I) and (II), three issues are left. Since the control architecture is not centerized but decenterized, each agent should know capabilities in passing and receiving skills of not only itself but the other. The simplest case is that the other has the same level skills. Otherwise, the agent should estimate the level of the other agent skills. That means agent modeling. Learning from observation \cite{Kuniyoshi93} seems promising, but the problem includes partial observation one due to the limitation of the perception. Even though both two agents have the reasonable skills of passing and receiving, the timings of passing and receiving should be learned between two. If both agent try to learn to skill up its behaviors, the learning will not converge because the policy of the other changes simultaneously. To prevent this situation, one of the agents should be a coach (fixed policy) and the other be a learner. In this case, modeling of the learner is another issue for good teaching. Selection of passing direction depends on the motions of opponents. This causes the opponent modeling issue which makes the cooperative behavior much harder to realize. Evaluation Since the challenge with many issues is very hard in the current stage, the challenge 97 will only check the possibility of the cooperative behavior in the benign environment, that is, the same level two players with no opponents.
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