We modelled emergence and spread of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 in Australia between December 2021 and June 2022. This pandemic stage exhibited a diverse epidemiological profile with emergence of co-circulating sub-lineages of Omicron, further complicated by differences in social distancing behaviour which varied over time. Our study delineated distinct phases of the Omicron-associated pandemic stage, and retrospectively quantified the adoption of social distancing measures, fluctuating over different time periods in response to the observable incidence dynamics. We also modelled the corresponding disease burden, in terms of hospitalisations, intensive care unit occupancy, and mortality. Supported by good agreement between simulated and actual health data, our study revealed that the nonlinear dynamics observed in the daily incidence and disease burden were determined not only by introduction of sub-lineages of Omicron, but also by the fluctuating adoption of social distancing measures. Our high-resolution model can be used in design and evaluation of public health interventions during future crises.

The COVID-19 pandemic created enormous public health and socioeconomic challenges. The health effects of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were often contrasted with significant social and economic costs. We describe a general framework aimed to derive adaptive cost-effective interventions, adequate for both recent and emerging pandemic threats. We also quantify the net health benefits and propose a reinforcement learning approach to optimise adaptive NPIs. The approach utilises an agent-based model simulating pandemic responses in Australia, and accounts for a heterogeneous population with variable levels of compliance fluctuating over time and across individuals. Our analysis shows that a significant net health benefit may be attained by adaptive NPIs formed by partial social distancing measures, coupled with moderate levels of the society's willingness to pay for health gains (health losses averted). We demonstrate that a socially acceptable balance between health effects and incurred economic costs is achievable over a long term, despite possible early setbacks.

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH), based on rational expectations and market equilibrium, is the dominant perspective for modelling economic markets. However, the most notable critique of the EMH is the inability to model periods of out-of-equilibrium behaviour in the absence of any significant external news. When such dynamics emerge endogenously, the traditional economic frameworks provide no explanation for such behaviour and the deviation from equilibrium. This work offers an alternate perspective explaining the endogenous emergence of punctuated out-of-equilibrium dynamics based on bounded rational agents. In a concise market entrance game, we show how boundedly rational strategic reasoning can lead to endogenously emerging crises, exhibiting fat tails in "returns". We also show how other common stylised facts of economic markets, such as clustered volatility, can be explained due to agent diversity (or lack thereof) and the varying learning updates across the agents. This work explains various stylised facts and crisis emergence in economic markets, in the absence of any external news, based purely on agent interactions and bounded rational reasoning.

Bounded rationality is an important consideration stemming from the fact that agents often have limits on their processing abilities, making the assumption of perfect rationality inapplicable to many real tasks. We propose an information-theoretic approach to the inference of agent decisions under Smithian competition. The model explicitly captures the boundedness of agents (limited in their information-processing capacity) as the cost of information acquisition for expanding their prior beliefs. The expansion is measured as the Kullblack-Leibler divergence between posterior decisions and prior beliefs. When information acquisition is free, the \textit{homo economicus} agent is recovered, while in cases when information acquisition becomes costly, agents instead revert to their prior beliefs. The maximum entropy principle is used to infer least-biased decisions, based upon the notion of Smithian competition formalised within the Quantal Response Statistical Equilibrium framework. The incorporation of prior beliefs into such a framework allowed us to systematically explore the effects of prior beliefs on decision-making, in the presence of market feedback. We verified the proposed model using Australian housing market data, showing how the incorporation of prior knowledge alters the resulting agent decisions. Specifically, it allowed for the separation (and analysis) of past beliefs and utility maximisation behaviour of the agent.

Fractals2019 started as a new experimental entry in the RoboCup Soccer 2D Simulation League, based on Gliders2d code base, and advanced to a team winning RoboCup-2019 championship. Our approach is centred on combinatorial optimisation methods, within the framework of Guided Self-Organisation (GSO), with the search guided by local constraints. We present examples of several tactical tasks based on the fully released Gliders2d code (version v2), including the search for an optimal assignment of heterogeneous player types, as well as blocking behaviours, offside trap, and attacking formations. We propose a new method, Dynamic Constraint Annealing, for solving dynamic constraint satisfaction problems, and apply it to optimise thermodynamic potential of collective behaviours, under dynamically induced constraints. 1 Introduction The RoboCup Soccer 2D Simulation League provides a rich dynamic environment, facilitated by the RoboCup Soccer Simulator (RCSS), aimed to test advances in decentralised collective behaviours of autonomous agents. The challenges include concurrent adversarial actions, computational nondetermin-ism, noise and latency in asynchronous perception and actuation, and limited processing time [1-9]. Over the years the progress of the League has been supported by several important base code releases, covering both low-level skills and standardised world models of simulated agents [10-13]. The release in 2010 of the base code of HELIOS team, agent2d-3.0.0, later upgraded to agent2d-3.1.1,

The selection of an appropriate competition format is critical for both the success and credibility of any competition, both real and simulated. In this paper, the automated parallelism offered by the RoboCupSoccer 2D simulation league is leveraged to conduct a 28,000 game round-robin between the top 8 teams from RoboCup 2012 and 2013. A proposed new competition format is found to reduce variation from the resultant statistically significant team performance rankings by 75% and 67%, when compared to the actual competition results from RoboCup 2012 and 2013 respectively. These results are statistically validated by generating 10,000 random tournaments for each of the three considered formats and comparing the respective distributions of ranking discrepancy.

The RoboCup 2D Simulation League incorporates several challenging features, setting a benchmark for Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this paper we describe some of the ideas and tools around the development of our team, Gliders2012. In our description, we focus on the evaluation function as one of our central mechanisms for action selection. We also point to a new framework for watching log files in a web browser that we release for use and further development by the RoboCup community. Finally, we also summarize results of the group and final matches we played during RoboCup 2012, with Gliders2012 finishing 4th out of 19 teams.