Collective intelligence for control of distributed dynamical systems

NASA Ames Research Center - Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA

Received: 30 November 1998
Accepted: 5 January 2000

Abstract

We consider the El Farol bar problem, also known as the minority game (W. B. Arthur, The American Economic Review, 84 (1994) 406; D. Challet and Y. C. Zhang, Physica A, 256 (1998) 514). 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.