Cooperation to Overcome a More Powerful Adversary (2012)
Author: Kay Holekamp
The spotted hyena of Eastern Africa can engage in sophisticated cooperation to overcome a more powerful predator, the lion. This video shows how a few hyenas first come across the lions at a kill, then make vocalizations to attract more hyenas to the area, excite each other through further vocalization, touching, and gestures, and eventual form a mob that jumps the lions and chases the lions away from the kill. (The video was shot by someone in South Africa, with permission given to Kay Holekamp to use it.)
People
Risto Miikkulainen Faculty risto [at] cs utexas edu
Padmini Rajagopalan Postdoctoral Alumni padminir [at] utexas edu
Aditya Rawal Ph.D. Alumni aditya [at] cs utexas edu
Kay E. Holekamp Formerly affiliated Collaborator holekamp [at] msu edu
Projects
Coevolution of Competitive and Cooperative Agent Behavior 2009 - Present
The Role of Emotion and Communication in Cooperative Behavior 2013 - 2016
Publications
Neuroevolution Insights Into Biological Neural Computation 2025
Risto Miikkulainen, Science, Vol. 387 (2025), pp. eadp7478.
Neuroevolution: Harnessing Creativity in AI Agent Design 2025
Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, David Ha, and Risto Miikkulainen, , MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2025. MIT Press.
Evolution of Complex Coordinated Behavior 2020
Padmini Rajagopalan, Kay E. Holekamp and Risto Miikkulainen, In 2020 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), July 2020.
Factors that Affect the Evolution of Complex Cooperative Behavior 2019
Padmini Rajagopalan, Kay E. Holekamp and Risto Miikkulainen, In The 2019 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2019), pp. 333--340, July 2019.
The Evolution of Coordinated Cooperative Behaviors 2016
Padmini Rajagopalan, PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin.
General Intelligence through Prolonged Evolution of Densely Connected Neural Networks 2014
Padmini Rajagopalan, Aditya Rawal, Kay E. Holekamp and Risto Miikkulainen, In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2014), Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 2014.
The Evolution of General Intelligence 2014
Padmini Rajagopalan, Kay E. Holekamp and Risto Miikkulainen, In Proceedings of The Fourteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE 14), New York, NY 2014.
Evolution of a Communication Code in Cooperative Tasks 2012
Aditya Rawal, Padmini Rajagopalan, Risto Miikkulainen and Kay Holekamp, In Artificial Life (13th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems), East Lansing, Michigan, USA 2012.
The Role of Reward Structure, Coordination Mechanism and Net Return in the Evolution of Cooperation 2011
Padmini Rajagopalan, Aditya Rawal, Risto Miikkulainen, Marc A. Wiseman and Kay E. Holekamp, In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2011), Seoul, South Korea 2011.
Related Areas
Artificial Life Cognitive Science
Labs
Neural Networks