Exploiting scale invariant dynamics for efficient information propagation in large teams

Large heterogeneous teams will often be in situations where sensor data that is uncertain and conflicting is shared across a peer-to-peer network. Not every team member will have direct access to sensors and team members will be influenced mostly by teammates with whom they communicate directly. In this paper, we investigate the dynamics and emergent behaviors of a large team sharing beliefs to reach conclusions about the world. We find empirically that the dynamics of information propagation in such belief sharing systems are characterized by information avalanches of belief changes caused by a single additional sensor reading. The distribution of the size of these avalanches dictates the speed and accuracy with which the team reaches conclusions. A key property of the system is that it exhibits qualitatively different dynamics and system performance over small changes in system parameter ranges. In one particular range, the system exhibits behavior known as scale-invariant dynamics ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Robin Glinton, Paul Scerri, Katia P. Sycara
• Keywords: ATAL 2010, Intelligent Agents, Team, Team Members, Team Reaches Conclusions