[R] The Hive Mind is a Single Reinforcement Learning Agent: Deriving the Exact Equivalence Between Swarm Dynamics and Multi-Armed Bandits

Overview

TL;DR We prove a mathematical equivalence between collective decision-making via local imitation (such as honey bees choosing a nest site via the waggle dance) and single-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a multi-armed bandit setting. Even when individual members have no learning capability and merely blindly imitate peers, the population distribution pi updates according to a macroscopic bandit RL algorithm that we call Maynard-Cross Learning (MCL), where N individuals act as N parallel envi

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