Chapter 5 2.2 Collective intelligence of mobs

In a pitch-black conference room in Las Vegas, an audience jubilantly waved cardboard sticks.One end of the paper stick is red and the other end is green.At the very end of the large meeting room, a video camera recorded the frenzied participants.Video cameras linked a matrix of colored dots on paper sticks to a suite of computers set up by graphics wizard Lauren Carpenter.Carpenter's custom software locates each red and green paper stick in the synagogue.Nearly 5,000 people attended tonight.A computer displays the exact location and color of each stick on a huge, detailed video map.The map is hung on the front desk for everyone to see.More importantly, the computer counts the total number of red and green paper sticks and uses this value to control the software.When the audience waved the paper sticks, the screen displayed a sea of ​​light dancing wildly in the dark, like a punk-style candlelight parade.Viewers see themselves as either red pixels or green pixels on the map.Flipping your own paper stick can instantly change the color of the pixels you project.

Lauren Carpenter fires up the old-school video game "Ping Pong" on the big screen. "Ping Pong" was the first popular commercial video game.The setup is surprisingly simple: a white dot jumps around in a box with movable rectangles on either side, simulating the action of a racket.Simply put, it is electronic table tennis.In this version, if you lift the red end of the paper stick, the racket moves up, otherwise it moves down.More precisely, the racket moves up and down as the average number of red paper sticks in the venue increases and decreases.Your stick is just one vote in the overall decision.

Carpenter doesn't need to explain too much, because the attendees of this 1991 meeting of computer graphics experts have probably all been obsessed with the game of "ping pong".Carpenter's voice echoed through the hall through the speakers: "Okay, guys. The guy on the left controls the left racket, the guy on the right controls the right racket. If you think you're on the left, you're on the left. Got it? start!" The audience cheered jubilantly.Nearly 5,000 people played Ping Pong Café Carnival without a moment's hesitation, and it was pretty good.Every movement of the racket reflects the average of thousands of players' intentions.This feeling can be disorienting at times.The racket will generally move as you want it to, but not always.When it doesn't go your way, you'll find yourself spending as much attention anticipating where the paddle will go as you would a ping-pong ball that's jumping over you.Everyone clearly senses that the intelligence of others is also at work in the game: a crowd of yelling hooligans.

The wisdom of crowds can play "ping pong" so well that Carpenter decided to make it harder.The ball bounces faster without prompting.The participants screamed in unison.But within a second or two, everyone immediately adjusted and accelerated the rhythm, playing better than before.Carpenter sped up the game further, and everyone immediately followed suit. "Let's try something else," Carpenter suggested.A seat map of the auditorium is displayed on the screen.He drew a large circle in the center with a white line. "Can you put a green '5' in the circle?" he asked the audience.Viewers stare at rows of red pixels.This game is a bit like holding billboards in a stadium to form a picture, but now there is no pre-set order, only a virtual reflection.Immediately, green pixels sprang up here and there in the red background, crooked and expanding erratically, as those who thought their seats were in the path of the "5" turned the paper sticks green.An originally blurred figure became clearer and clearer.Amid the noise, the audience began to recognize a "5" together. Once the word "5" is recognized, it suddenly becomes clear.The paper stick waver sitting on the blurred edge of the figure determines where he "should" be, making the word "5" appear more clearly.Numbers build themselves up.

"Now, display '4'!" The voice sounded.A "4" appears momentarily. "3", in the blink of an eye "3" is displayed.Then, "2... 1... 0" appeared one by one quickly and continuously. Lauren Carpenter fires up an airplane flight simulator on-screen.He explained the gameplay succinctly: "The guy on the left controls the roll, and the guy on the right controls the pitch. If you point the plane at anything interesting, I'll shoot a rocket at it." The plane starts out in the air.The pilots are... five thousand novices.For the first time the auditorium was completely silent.All were studying the navigator as the scene outside the windshield of the plane unfolded.The plane was landing in the pink valley among the pink hills.The runway looks very narrow.

The idea of ​​having airline passengers co-pilot a plane is as exciting as it is ludicrous.This kind of crude democracy feels really exciting.As a passenger, you have the right to vote on every detail, not only the direction the plane is heading, but when to adjust the flaps to change lift. But the wisdom of crowds seems to be a handicap at the crucial moment of landing, when there is no time to equalize popular opinion.As the 5,000 attendees began descending for the landing, the quiet hall erupted in shouts and urgent commands.The auditorium is like a cockpit in times of crisis. "Green, green, green!" a small group of people shouted. "More red!" After a while, another large group shouted again. "Red, red, red-color!" The plane banked dizzyingly to the left.Apparently, it was going to miss the runway, wing-first.A flight simulator is not like a "ping-pong" game. It sets a period of delayed feedback from the action of the hydraulic lever to the reaction of the fuselage, from the nudge of the aileron stick to the side of the fuselage.These hidden signals mess with the minds of crowds.Affected by overcorrection, the fuselage fell into a pitching shock.The plane wobbled.However, everyone somehow interrupted the landing procedure and pulled up the nose rationally to go around.They turned the plane around and tried to land again.

How did they turn around?No one decides whether the plane turns left or right, or even whether it turns or not, no one decides.However, as if all were united, the plane turned sideways and departed.Tried to land again, wobbled again.There was no communication this time, and everyone jumped up like a flock of birds and pulled up the plane again.The plane wobbled a little during ascent, then rolled a little more.At this incredible moment, 5,000 people had the same firm thought at the same time: "I don't know if it can be turned 360 degrees?" Everyone continued to flip the plane without saying a word.There is no turning back now.As the horizon flipped dizzyingly up and down, five thousand layman pilots rolled the plane on their first solo flight.That movement is really beautiful.They stood up and applauded themselves for a long time.

The participants did what birds do: they managed to form a flock.However, their grouping behavior is conscious.When collaborating to form a "5" or maneuver an airplane, they are responding to their own general profile.And a bird in flight has no global concept of its own flock shape.Birds flying in flocks are blind to the flight attitude and aggregation of flocks. It is from such a group of creatures that the "group state" emerges that has no regard for the shape, size or formation of its group. At dawn, tens of thousands of wild ducks were restless on the weedy Lake Michigan.Illuminated by the soft reddish glow of the morning, the wild ducks squawked and flapped their wings as they dipped their heads into the water for breakfast.They are scattered all over the place.Suddenly, prompted by some signal that humans cannot feel, a thousand ducks soared into the air as a whole.They flew into the sky with a bang, and then drove thousands of wild ducks on the lake to take off together, as if they were a lying giant, and now they turned over and sat up.The astonishing beast circled in the sky, turned towards the sun in the east, and turned sharply again in the blink of an eye, the front team became the rear team.Presently, as if controlled by some single thought, the whole flock turned westward and flew away.An unknown poet in the seventeenth century wrote: "...Thousands of fish swim like a giant beast, breaking the waves. They seem to be bound by an irresistible common destiny as a whole. Where does this unity come from? coming?"

A flock is not one huge bird.Science Reporter James Gleick writes: "No single bird or fish's motion, however smooth, can give us the density of starlings swirling over a cornfield or the file of a million mackerel. The shock of the queue.... (of the flock of birds sprinting away from the predator) high-speed film shows that the steering motion is transmitted from one bird to another at about one-seventieth of a second in a wave-sensing manner. to another bird. Much faster response than a single bird.” Flocks are far from simple aggregations of birds. There's a scene in Batman Returns where a swarm of giant black bats swarms through a flooded tunnel into downtown New York.These bats are made by computer.The animator first makes a bat and gives it a certain space so that it can flap its wings automatically; and then copies dozens of bats until they form a group.Afterwards, let each bat fly around the screen on its own, but follow a few simple rules built into the algorithm: don't bump into other bats, keep up with the bats next to you, and don't stray too far from the group.When these "algorithmic bats" run on the screen, they swarm like real bats.

Group laws were discovered by Craig Reynolds.He was a computer scientist working at Symbolics, a maker of graphics hardware.He had a simple equation, and by tweaking the various forces involved—a little more cohesion, a little less delay—Reynolds could make the swarm behave like a living swarm of bats, sparrows, or fish.Even the marching colony of penguins in Batman Returns is aggregated according to Reynolds' algorithm.Like a bat, a lot of computer modeled 3D penguins were copied at first thought, and then released into a scene facing in a specific direction.When they are walking on the snow-covered streets, they easily appear to be pushing and shoving, and they are not controlled by anyone.

The flocks generated by Reynolds' simple algorithm were so realistic that when biologists reviewed their own high-speed movies, they concluded that the flock behavior of real birds and fish must arise from a set of similarities. simple rules.Crowds have been seen as the defining symbol of living beings, and certain spectacular formations can only be achieved by living beings.Today, according to Reynolds' algorithm, swarms are seen as an adaptive technique applicable to any distributed living system, organic or man-made.