Related papers: When is social computation better than the sum of …

Spatial search problems abound in the real world, from locating hidden nuclear or chemical sources to finding skiers after an avalanche. We exemplify the formalism and solution for spatial searches involving two agents that may or may not…

A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…

The notion that cooperation can aid a group of agents to solve problems more efficiently than if those agents worked in isolation is prevalent, despite the little quantitative groundwork to support it. Here we consider a primordial form of…

Despite the occurrence of elegant algorithms for solving complex problem, exhaustive search has retained its significance since many real-life problems exhibit no regular structure and exhaustive search is the only possible solution. The…

Collective or group intelligence is manifested in the fact that a team of cooperating agents can solve problems more efficiently than when those agents work in isolation. Although cooperation is, in general, a successful problem solving…

The coordination of autonomous agents is a critical issue for decentralized communication networks. Instead of transmitting information, the agents interact in a coordinated manner in order to optimize a general objective function. A target…

Why do collectives outperform individuals when solving some problems? Fundamentally, collectives have greater computational resources with more sensory information, more memory, more processing capacity, and more ways to act. While greater…

Problem solving (e.g., drug design, traffic engineering, software development) by task forces represents a substantial portion of the economy of developed countries. Here we use an agent-based model of cooperative problem solving systems to…

A new approach for the description of phenomena of social aggregation is suggested. On the basis of psychological concepts (as for instance social norms and cultural coordinates), we deduce a general mechanism for the social aggregation in…

We initiate the study of a quantity that we call coordination complexity. In a distributed optimization problem, the information defining a problem instance is distributed among $n$ parties, who need to each choose an action, which jointly…

We consider the distributed optimization problem, where a group of agents work together to optimize a common objective by communicating with neighboring agents and performing local computations. For a given algorithm, we use tools from…

We consider the problem of designing a set of computational agents so that as they all pursue their self-interests a global function G of the collective system is optimized. Three factors govern the quality of such design. The first relates…

Global coordination is required to solve a wide variety of challenging collective action problems from network colorings to the tragedy of the commons. Recent empirical study shows that the presence of a few noisy autonomous agents can…

Human societies continuously transform scattered information into collective judgments and coordinated action, whether through markets discovering prices, governments allocating resources, communities enforcing norms, or science converging…

This paper addresses the problem of collaboratively satisfying long-term spatial constraints in multi-agent systems. Each agent is subject to spatial constraints, expressed as inequalities, which may depend on the positions of other agents…

In large groups, every collaborative act requires balancing two pressures: the need to achieve behavioural synchrony and the need to keep free riding to a minimum. This paper introduces a model of collaboration that requires both…

Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a…

Often times, individuals working together as a team can solve hard problems beyond the capability of any individual in the team. Cooperative optimization is a newly proposed general method for attacking hard optimization problems inspired…

In this work, we initiate the investigation of optimization opportunities in collaborative crowdsourcing. Many popular applications, such as collaborative document editing, sentence translation, or citizen science resort to this special…

Distributed control algorithms are known to reduce overall computation time compared to centralized control algorithms. However, they can result in inconsistent solutions leading to the violation of safety-critical constraints. Inconsistent…