#collective-behavior

[sxpxrmxrgxr]

[bradly-alicea]

Just leaving this here. The comparisons are real life versus simulated life. Quite an interesting questions, being revisited periodically.

First image from the Fake Life Recognition Contest,  Olaf Witkowski and Lana Sinapayen

Second image (the unidentified simulated nematode) was created using the Geppetto platform.

[bradly-alicea]

Which is better: the wisdom of crowds vs. the wisdom of individuals? Or both depending on the context?

Is collective behavior (e.g. the idea of wisdom of the crowd) always better than individual behavior? And what defines the boundaries of behavioral collectives? Three recent papers might be able to shed some light on the subject. 

The first paper [1] reveals that collectives are best at producing "mean-field behavior" and performing difficult discrimination tasks that cannot be performed well by individuals.

The second paper [2] deals with cases in which individual perception (e.g. sophisticated decision-making using iterated learning) is more beneficial than engaging in collective behavior.

To understand the role of system boundaries, the third paper [3] brings us closer to defining system boundaries in a small-world network (e.g. the required size of coherent social units in a specific social configuration).

[1] Sasaki, T., Granovskiy, B., Mann, R.P., Sumpter, D.J.T., and Pratt, S.C.   Ant colonies outperform individuals when a sensory discrimination task is difficult but not when it is easy. PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.13049 17110 (2013).

[2] Lewandowsky, S., Griffiths, T.L., and Kalish, M.L.   The Wisdom of Individuals: exploring people’s knowledge about everyday events using iterated learning. Cognitive Science, 33, 969–998 (2009).

[3] Thiemann, C., Theis, F., Grady, D., Brune, R., and Brockmann, D.   The Structure of Borders in a Small World. PLoS One, 5(11), e15422 (2010). 

Bottom figure courtesy of: Newman, M.E.J.   Modularity and community structure in networks. PNAS, 103(23), 8577–8582 (2006).

[njr]

Abstract: Human collective behavior can vary from calm to panicked depending on social context. Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disordered gas-like state called a mosh pit and an ordered vortex-like state called a circle pit. Both phenomena are reproduced in flocking simulations demonstrating that human collective behavior is consistent with the predictions of simplified models.