Collective Intelligence

There are many information-processing problems that can only be solved by the joint action of large communities of computers each running a sophisticated machine learning algorithm, where those algorithms are not subject to cen-tralized, global control. Examples are routing of air traffic, control of swarms of spacecraft, routing of packages across the internet, and communication between the multiple processors in a modern computer.

Such problems can be addressed with the emerging science of “Collective Intelligence” (COIN), which is concerned with the design of a multi-agent system where:

- Agents are “selfish” in that they act to try to optimize their own utilities, without explicit regard to cooperation with other agents.

- There is a well-specified global objective, and we are confronted with the inverse problem of how to configure the system to achieve that objective.