How Collective Intelligence Emerges in a Crowd of People Through Learned Division of Labor: A Case Study

Wang, Dekun, Zhang, Hongwei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

This paper investigates the factors fostering collective intelligence (CI) through a case study of *LinYi's Experiment, where over 2000 human players collectively controll an avatar car. By conducting theoretical analysis and replicating observed behaviors through numerical simulations, we demonstrate how self-organized division of labor (DOL) among individuals fosters the emergence of CI and identify two essential conditions fostering CI by formulating this problem into a stability problem of a Markov Jump Linear System (MJLS). These conditions, independent of external stimulus, emphasize the importance of both elite and common players in fostering CI. Additionally, we propose an index for emergence of CI and a distributed method for estimating joint actions, enabling individuals to learn their optimal social roles without global action information of the whole crowd.