Collectives and the Design of Complex Systems

With the advent of extremely affordable computing power, the world is becoming filled with distributed systems of computationally sophisticated components. However, no current scientific discipline offers a thorough understanding of the relation of such "collectives" and how well they meet performance criteria.Collectives and Design of Complex Systems lays the foundation for the study of collective intelligence and how these entities can be developed to yield optimal performance. Part one describes how some information-processing problems can only be solved by the joint actions of large communities of computers, each running their own complex, decentralized machine-learning algorithms. Part two offers general analysis on the dynamics and structures of collectives. Finally, part three addresses economic,model-free, and control-theory approaches to designing these complex systems. The work assumes a modest understanding of basic statistics and calculus.Integrates theory with real-world practice.

ISBN 0387401652   Pages 332 ISBN13 9780387401652 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Springer-Verlag New York Inc.   Weight (grammes) 580 Imprint Springer-Verlag New York Inc.   Published in New York, NY Format Hardback   Height (mm) 235 Publication date 17 Jun 2004   Width (mm) 155 Library of Congress QA76.9.D5   Spine width (mm) 20 DEWEY 006.3   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

1		A survey of collectives by Kagan Tumer and David Wolpert		1
2		Theory of collective intelligence by David Wolpert		43
3		On learnable mechanism design by David C. Parkes		107
4		Asynchronous learning in decentralized environments : a game-theoretic approach by Eric J. Friedman		133
5		Competition between adaptive agents : learning and collective efficiency by Damien Challet		145
6		Managing catastrophic changes in a collective by David Lamper and Paul Jefferies and Michael Hart and Neil F. Johnson		161
7		Effects of interagent communications on the collective by Zoltan Toroczkai and Marian Anghel and Gyorgy Korniss and Kevin E. Bassler		185
8		Man and superman : human limitations, innovation, and emergence in resource competition by Robert Savit and Katia Koelle and Wendy Treynor and Richard Gonzalez		199
9		Design principles for the distributed control of modular self-reconfigurable robots by Arancha Casal and Tad Hogg		213
10		Two paradigms for the design of artificial collectives by Kristina Lerman and Aram Galstyan		231
11		Efficiency and equity in collective systems of interacting heterogeneous agents by Akira Namatame and Saori Iwanaga		257
12		Selection in coevolutionary algorithms and the inverse problem by Sevan Ficici and Ofer Melnik and Jordan Pollack		277
13		Dynamics of large autonomous computational systems by Tad Hogg and Bernardo A. Huberman		295

From the reviews:

"From the cybernetics point of view complex systems embrace a great number of disciplines a ] . this text is concerned with a computer-science viewpoint and addresses issues in the design of complex systems. It is presented as a collection of chapters which although independent make up a readable whole. The book is highly recommended by several writers and reviewers." (C.J.H. Mann, Kybernetes: The International Journal of Systems & Cybernetics, (34) 5, 2005)

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