Iain Couzin

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“The Robots’ Collective Movement Is An Organic Outgrowth Of That Self-Correction”

February 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A hammer can be a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and that’s important to remember while we’re being wowed by Boston Dynamics’ new four-legged robot, Spot. Neel V. Patel of Wired noticed something about the viral video showcasing the AI: a moment which is perhaps coincidence or maybe collective behavior, even if it isn’t swarm robotics. An excerpt:

We’ve seen all of this—admittedly amazing—stuff out of BD’s four-legged robots before. But it gets crazier around the 1:20 mark, when a pair of Spots begin trekking up a hill. Spot Number One starts repeatedly colliding into Spot Number Two—and neither loses balance. After a few seconds and a bit of subtle push-and-shove, they straighten out and walk in parallel again, and then turn together once they reach the top of the hill. This is getting creepy, guys—it looks like these robots are exhibiting the same swarm-like behavior that we see in animals.

We checked in with Iain Couzin, a Princeton biologist and expert in the study of collective animal behavior, to get his take on the robots’ seeming hive mind.

We know from Spot’s reaction to that kick that he can dynamically correct his stability—behavior that’s modeled after biological systems. From what Couzin can tell, the robots’ collective movement is an organic outgrowth of that self-correction. When the two Spots collide at the 1:25 mark, they’re both able to recover quickly from the nudge and continue on their route up the hill. “But the collision does result in them tending to align with one another (since each pushes against the other),” Couzin wrote in an email. “That can be an important factor: Simple collisions among individuals can result in collective motion.”

In Couzin’s research on locusts, for example, the insects form plagues that move together by just barely avoiding collisions. “Recently, avoidance has also been shown to allow the humble fruit fly to make effective collective decisions,” he wrote.

It doesn’t look like Spot is programmed to work with his twin brothers and sisters—but that doesn’t matter if their coordination emerges naturally from the physical rules that govern each individual robot. Clearly, bumping into each other isn’t the safest or most efficient way to get your robot army to march in lock step, but it’s a good start.•

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“Small Crowds May Actually Be The Smartest”

May 13, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Extrapolating on the Wisdom of Crowds theory, new research suggests that small crowds might be wiser than large ones. Perhaps. But what if it’s a tight-knit community of morons? Would the thinking be good then? What if it’s a politicized group that makes decisions that have immediate benefits for its own members without regard to others or to long-term ramifications? What if we’re talking about a doomsday cult? From Drake Bennett at Businessweek:

“The wisdom of crowds is one of those perfectly of-our-moment ideas. The phrase comes from New Yorker writer James Surowiecki, whose book of that title was published almost a decade ago. Its thesis is nicely summed up in its opening, which describes the 19th-century English scientist Francis Galton’s realization, while attending a county fair, that in a competition to guess the weight of an ox the average of all of the guesses people had submitted (787 in all) was almost exactly right: 1,197 pounds vs. the actual weight of 1,198 pounds, a degree of accuracy that no individual could attain on his own. As individuals we may be ignorant and short-sighted, but together we’re wise.

The implication is that the bigger the crowd, the greater the accuracy. It’s like running an experiment: All else being equal, the larger the sample size, the more trustworthy the result. The idea has a particular resonance at a time when online businesses from Amazon.com to Yelp rely on aggregated user reviews, and social networks such as Facebook sell ads that rely in part on showing you how many of your friends ‘like’ something.

A new paper by the Princeton evolutionary biologist Iain Couzin and his student Albert Kao, however, suggests that bigger isn’t necessarily better. In fact, small crowds may actually be the smartest. ‘We do not find the classic view of the wisdom of crowds in most environments,’ says Couzin of their results. ‘Instead, what we find is that there’s a small optimal group size of eight to 12 individuals that tends to optimize decisions.’

The research started from the fact that, in nature—where, unlike at county fairs, accuracy has life-or-death consequences—many animals live in relatively small groups. Why, Couzin wondered, would so many species fail to take advantage of the informational benefits of the crowd?”

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