NetAttack

We're thinking about co-evolving a network and an attacker agent to see which topologies emerge in the network and which strategies may be used by agents within the network to create that topology. The starting point of our idea was the question if networks containing nodes that are "too big too fail" may reduce the resilience if directed attacks against important nodes are performed against the network - or if the networks can in fact reorganize rapidly in case of the failure of a central node.

Open Issues to be discussed

• Define a proper research questions: we should probably come up with some guiding research questions.
• Who is evolving? Agents or the Network? We have to decide if our basic building blocks that evolve are the nodes that apply different linking strategies (i.e. every agent has a genome representing linking strategies) or if the network itself evolves (i.e. the network configuration is the genome). The same applies to the attacker: is there one central attacker or do we have a group of attackers (which may cooperate)
• Fitness of Network components and attackers: we have to find a good fitness measure, which very much is connected with the definition of our evolving entities. If we decide that single nodes evolve, fitness of a single node in the network could be simply survival - and to survive, links to neighbours are necessary, e.g. to harvest energy from the network.
• Network aim: what is the main aim of the network? What is transported through the network and how is this related to the fitness of the network (or the nodes in the network)?
• Resource constraints: we could introduce a single resource, e.g. energy, that may be used either for consumption, for building links, or for transporting over these links.
• Genome: how does the genome of attackers and network (or network nodes) look like?
• Strategies for network components and attackers: which strategies may be implemented by the different agents?
• Real world examples: are there any real world examples we can relate to?

Possible Java Tools

Java with jung library Python with _?

Background reading

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