Evolution of artifact capabilities

The subject of artifact or tool use is considered in many fields to be a vital area of research in the study of general human competence. Recently in artificial intelligence, formalizations of the mental attitudes of intentional agents have been extended to include agent capabilities with respect to artifacts or tools. We consider understanding how these individual capabilities are learned and how they evolve as important steps towards formally defining, representing and implementing complex group capabilities. In this paper, a theoretical model for artifact capability is extended to incorporate evolution and learning through exploratory methods. A representation of artifacts and the cognition of a rational agent that can learn artifact use are provided. Supervised learning is assumed and combined with historical knowledge and genetic algorithms to provide an implementation of a multi-agent simulation. The simulation is built to support an agent with the ability to learn an artifact capability through observations of its own behavior, as well as through observations of other agents in a social environment. Results obtained from the simple yet practical approach, show that learned use of artifacts outperforms random use and rational agents can learn artifact use more efficiently as a social species than on their own.