Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-5100, USA.
Cogn Sci. 2012 Apr;36(3):452-70. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01223.x. Epub 2012 Jan 23.
The "wisdom of the crowd" phenomenon refers to the finding that the aggregate of a set of proposed solutions from a group of individuals performs better than the majority of individual solutions. Most often, wisdom of the crowd effects have been investigated for problems that require single numerical estimates. We investigate whether the effect can also be observed for problems where the answer requires the coordination of multiple pieces of information. We focus on combinatorial problems such as the planar Euclidean traveling salesperson problem, minimum spanning tree problem, and a spanning tree memory task. We develop aggregation methods that combine common solution fragments into a global solution and demonstrate that these aggregate solutions outperform the majority of individual solutions. These case studies suggest that the wisdom of the crowd phenomenon might be broadly applicable to problem-solving and decision-making situations that go beyond the estimation of single numbers.
“群体智慧”现象是指这样一种发现，即一组个体提出的解决方案的总和比大多数个体解决方案表现更好。大多数情况下，人们已经研究了需要单个数值估计的问题的群体智慧效应。我们研究了在需要协调多个信息的问题中，这种效应是否也能观察到。我们专注于组合问题，例如平面欧几里得旅行商问题、最小生成树问题和生成树记忆任务。我们开发了聚合方法，将常见的解决方案片段组合成一个全局解决方案，并证明这些聚合解决方案优于大多数个体解决方案。这些案例研究表明，群体智慧现象可能广泛适用于超越单个数字估计的问题解决和决策情况。
