Collective Intelligence for Control of Distributed Dynamical Systems

Abstract

We consider the El Farol bar problem, also known as the minority game (W. B. Arthur, ``The American Economic Review'', 84(2): 406--411 (1994), D. Challet and Y.C. Zhang, ``Physica A'', 256:514 (1998)). We view it as an instance of the general problem of how to configure the nodal elements of a distributed dynamical system so that they do not ``work at cross purposes'', in that their collective dynamics avoids frustration and thereby achieves a provided global goal. We summarize a mathematical theory for such configuration applicable when (as in the bar problem) the global goal can be expressed as minimizing a global energy function and the nodes can be expressed as minimizers of local free energy functions. We show that a system designed with that theory performs nearly optimally for the bar problem.

8 pages

References in corpus (8)

• On the Minority Game : Analytical and Numerical Studies
• An Introduction to Collective Intelligence
• A thermal model for adaptive competition in a market
• A Prototype Model of Stock Exchange
• Using Collective Intelligence to Route Internet Traffic
• Modeling Market Mechanism with Evolutionary Games
• Competition, efficiency and collective behavior in the "El Farol" bar model
• Adaptive Competition, Market Efficiency, Phase Transitions and Spin-Glasses

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