Agent boredom

Agents repeatedly performing the same interaction might become bored. This can be modeled through using a boredom handler (model.boredomhandler.BoredomHandler). A boredom handler is an object of type BoredomHandler, implementing the process_boredom method.

The boredom handler is attached to the interaction memory of an agent (model.interactionmemory.InteractionMemory) and the process_boredom method receives as input the interaction memory, the (potentially composite) interaction that is to be evaluated, and the valence (pre-boredom) of the interaction. The result of the process_boredom method should be the valence taking boredom into account.

A trivial boredom handler not taking any form of boredom into account is:

class PassthroughBoredomHandler(BoredomHandler):
    """
    A boredom handler not implementing any boredom measures.
    """
    def process_boredom(self, interaction_memory, interaction, unmodified_valence):
        return unmodified_valence

This handler can be attached to an agent by writing:

class Exp(experiment.Experiment):
    # ...

    def __init__(self):
        # ...
        agent = # ... (initialize agent)
        agent.set_interaction_memory(interactionmemory.InteractionMemory(
            boredom_handler = model.boredomhandler.PassthroughBoredomHandler
        ))
        # ... add interactions to the agent
        self.world.add_entity(agent)
        # ...

The default boredom handler is set in the initialization method of model.interactionmemory.InteractionMemory.