Collective Cognition Mathematical Foundations of Distributed Intelligence

This is a very interesting, though somewhat technical, description of the idea of collective cognition and how applicable to our world it is. Intriguing how mathematics is being applied to more and more system that we encounter in our everyday life (or things that are very "natural") as new methods are being developed.

http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~dynlearn/colcog/description.htm

Many forms of individual cognition are enhanced by communication and collaboration with other intelligent agents. We propose to call this collective cognition, by analogy with the well known concept of collective action. People (and other intelligent agents) often ``think better'' in groups and sometimes think in ways which would be simply impossible for isolated individuals. Perhaps the most spectacular and important instance of collective cognition is modern science. An array of formal organizations and informal social institutions also can be considered means of collective cognition. For instance, Hayek famously argued that competitive markets effectively calculate an adaptive allocation of resources that could not be calculated by any individual market-participant. Hitherto the study of collective cognition has been qualitative, philosophical, even at times anecdotal. Only recently, we believe, have the tools fallen into place to initiate a rigorous, quantitative science of collective cognition. Moreover, it appears that soon there will be a real practical need for such a science.

Collective cognition involves an interaction among three elements-the individual abilities of the agents, their shared knowledge, and their communication structure. Cognitive collectives therefore resemble many other complex systems which are collectives of goal-directed processes. Typically, the individual processes know little of the detailed dynamics and the state of the overall system and, therefore, must use adaptive techniques to achieve their goals. There are many naturally occurring examples, including human economies, human organizations, ecosystems, and even spin glasses. In addition, it has recently become clear that many of the engineered systems of the future must be of this type, with massively distributed computational elements. There is optimism in the multi-agent system (MAS) field that widely applicable solutions to large, distributed problems are close at hand. Some experts now believe that, in the information and telecommunications networks of today, we have nascent examples of artificial cognitive collectives.

There are many fields that have addressed aspects of collective cognition, from decentralized control theory to economics and game theory to social psychology. However, there are major differences in both the approach such fields take and the set of assumptions that form the basis of those fields. For example, the components of a multi-agent system may have many degrees of freedom that human beings lack, and lack many that human beings possess. Since MAS designers can, to a large extent, chose what degrees of freedom to give their agents, they have more flexibility in choosing policies for agent-agent interactions than (say) economists doing mechanism design. Furthermore, while game theory has established a strong theoretical basis, across several disciplines, for analyzing the equilibrium behavior of systems and how various equilibrium states relate to one another, there is little work on far-from-equilibrium behaviors and their robustness to perturbations.

http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~dynlearn/colcog/description.htm