Applying Complexity Science with Machine Learning, Agent-Based Models, and Game Engines: Towards Embodied Complex Systems Engineering

The application of Complexity Science, an undertaking referred to here as Complex Systems Engineering, often presents challenges in the form of agent-based policy development for bottom-up complex adaptive system design and simulation. Determining the policies that agents must follow in order to participate in an emergent property or function that is not pathological in nature is often an intensive, manual process. Here we will examine a novel path to agent policy development in which we do not manually craft the policies, but allow them to emerge through the application of machine learning within a game engine environment. The utilization of a game engine as an agent-based modeling platform provides a novel mechanism to develop and study intelligent agent-based systems that can be experienced and interacted with from multiple perspectives by a learning agent. In this paper we present results from an example use-case and discuss next steps for research in this area.