Task 9 Flashcards
What are three often mentioned advantages of collective systems?
Flexibility, Robustness, Self-Organization
What is CompanyWay’s approach to make use of the phenomenon of ants laying pheromone trails?
- Workers work towards set goals but are free in their way of working
- Ideas get refined by others and earn points the more they are being used
What three kinds of recruitment take place in ant colonies?
- Mass recruiting (pheromones)
- Group Recruiting (Antenna signals)
- Tandem Recruiting (Antenna Signals)
How can the recruitment of ant colonies be implemented in a business world?
- Strategy is often dependent on the organization’s size
- For group recruitment to succeed, a company needs to:
o Maintain their ability to explore new opportunities while exploiting existing ones
o Enable a person with an idea to recruit others
o Let the system self-select the best ideas
o Support winning ideas with sufficient resources
What are implicit coordination strategies?
Providing information that only acts as a guide for teammates without asking for a specific response.
What psychological prerequisite is important for effective implicit communication?
Shared Mental Models: common understanding of who is responsible for what task and what the information requirements are
How can one plan a task in a way that supports shared mental models?
- Creating an open environment
- Setting goals and awareness of consequences
- Exchanging preferences and expectations
- Clarifying roles and information to be traded
- Clarifying sequence and timing issues
- Discussing handling of unexpected events
- Discussing how high workload effects performance
Which kind of coordination strategy is correlated with performance?
Implicit
How can the phenomenon of implicit coordination prevailing over explicit be explained?
Switching-Cost Theory: In explicit communication, team members have to switch attention from their task to the request, respond, and then turn back to their task. This task-switching costs time. Implicit cues offer the team-mate flexibility to interpret and apply the information as it fits
Applying the study of implicit coordination, how should machine teammates behave?
- Communicate with an understanding of how the human teammate will incorporate the cues into their action planning
- Respond to communications differently depending on whether they are implicit, explicit, verbal-only, nonverbal, or combined
- Exhibit different types of coordination behaviors and use implicit vs explicit cues deliberately
What is the definition of Stigmergy?
communication by altering the state of the environment in a way that will affect the behaviors of others
How do you differentiate between cue-based and sign-based stigmergy?
Cue-based: The change in the environment implies a cue for the behavior of other actors
Sign-based: The environmental change actively sends a signal to other actors
Why does, according to Langton, a collective system perform best when on the “edge of chaos”?
Example:
- If pheromone distribution is random, no path can be found from this
- If there is too much pheromone in one place, the system becomes too rigid and might attract the ants into a pointless conformity
-> The system functions best if the parameters are in balance
What kind of behavior of humans is similar to a school of fish?
Our mental life
In what way is Brook’s Subsummption Architecture different from swarm intelligence?
In swarm intelligence, the global behavior is emergent from local interactions, in Brook’s model however, the global behavior is merely the sum of all individual processes.
