Simple distributed strategies that modify the behavior of selfish individuals in a manner that enhances cooperation or global efficiency have proved difficult to identify. We consider a network of selfish agents who each optimize their individual utilities by coordinating (or anticoordinating) with their neighbors, to maximize the payoffs from randomly weighted pairwise games. In general, agents will opt for the behavior that is the best compromise (for them) of the many conflicting constraints created by their neighbors, but the attractors of the system as a whole will not maximize total utility. We then consider agents that act as creatures of habit by increasing their preference to coordinate (anticoordinate) with whichever neighbors they are coordinated (anticoordinated) with at present. These preferences change slowly while the system is repeatedly perturbed, so that it settles to many different local attractors. We find that under these conditions, with each perturbation there is a progressively higher chance of the system settling to a configuration with high total utility. Eventually, only one attractor remains, and that attractor is very likely to maximize (or almost maximize) global utility. This counterintuitive result can be understood using theory from computational neuroscience; we show that this simple form of habituation is equivalent to Hebbian learning, and the improved optimization of global utility that is observed results from well-known generalization capabilities of associative memory acting at the network scale. This causes the system of selfish agents, each acting individually but habitually, to collectively identify configurations that maximize total utility.

In some circumstances complex adaptive systems composed of numerous self-interested agents can self-organize into structures that enhance global adaptation, efficiency, or function. However, the general conditions for such an outcome are poorly understood and present a fundamental open question for domains as varied as ecology, sociology, economics, organismic biology, and technological infrastructure design. In contrast, sufficient conditions for artificial neural networks to form structures that perform collective computational processes such as associative memory/recall, classification, generalization, and optimization are well understood. Such global functions within a single agent or organism are not wholly surprising, since the mechanisms (e.g., Hebbian learning) that create these neural organizations may be selected for this purpose; but agents in a multi-agent system have no obvious reason to adhere to such a structuring protocol or produce such global behaviors when acting from individual self-interest. However, Hebbian learning is actually a very simple and fully distributed habituation or positive feedback principle. Here we show that when self-interested agents can modify how they are affected by other agents (e.g., when they can influence which other agents they interact with), then, in adapting these inter-agent relationships to maximize their own utility, they will necessarily alter them in a manner homologous with Hebbian learning. Multi-agent systems with adaptable relationships will thereby exhibit the same system-level behaviors as neural networks under Hebbian learning. For example, improved global efficiency in multi-agent systems can be explained by the inherent ability of associative memory to generalize by idealizing stored patterns and/or creating new combinations of subpatterns. Thus distributed multi-agent systems can spontaneously exhibit adaptive global behaviors in the same sense, and by the same mechanism, as with the organizational principles familiar in connectionist models of organismic learning.