Heuristic Diversity, Your Key to Knowledge, Wealth and Power (Dept. of "Yay Team!")
Attention conservation notice: Brazen promotion of
research done at the center where I
work; worse yet, one of the
authors is my boss.
I meant to write about this quite some time ago, but held off because I had
too much to say, and still do. But seeing Muck and Mystery
blog a third-hand account of this really cool work --- someone's notes on a
presentation by James "Wisdom
of Crowds" Surowiecki --- prompts me to plug the actual research
here.
- Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, "Groups of diverse problem solvers can
outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers", Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (USA) 101 (2004):
16385--16389 [PDF
reprint]
- Abstract: We introduce a general framework for modeling
functionally diverse problem-solving agents. In this framework, problem-solving
agents possess representations of problems and algorithms that they use to
locate solutions. We use this framework to establish a result relevant to
group composition. We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a
diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly selected agents
outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing agents. This result relies
on the intuition that, as the initial pool of problem solvers becomes large,
the best-performing agents necessarily become similar in the space of problem
solvers. Their relatively greater ability is more than offset by their lack of
problem-solving diversity.
There will be 2,500 words more on this later.
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Posted at March 31, 2005 09:45 | permanent link