The Odyssey of the Fittest: Can Agents Survive and Still Be Good?

As AI models grow in power and generality, understanding how agents learn and make decisions in complex environments is critical to promoting ethical behavior. This study introduces the Odyssey, a lightweight, adaptive text based adventure game, providing a scalable framework for exploring AI ethics and safety. The Odyssey examines the ethical implications of implementing biological drives, specifically, self preservation, into three different agents. A Bayesian agent optimized with NEAT, a Bayesian agent optimized with stochastic variational inference, and a GPT 4o agent. The agents select actions at each scenario to survive, adapting to increasingly challenging scenarios. Post simulation analysis evaluates the ethical scores of the agent decisions, uncovering the tradeoffs it navigates to survive. Specifically, analysis finds that when danger increases, agents ethical behavior becomes unpredictable. Surprisingly, the GPT 4o agent outperformed the Bayesian models in both survival and ethical consistency, challenging assumptions about traditional probabilistic methods and raising a new challenge to understand the mechanisms of LLMs' probabilistic reasoning.

@article{waldner2025_2502.05442,
  title={ The Odyssey of the Fittest: Can Agents Survive and Still Be Good? },
  author={ Dylan Waldner and Risto Miikkulainen },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05442},
  year={ 2025 }
}