Wu Song, Sun Quanbin
School of Built and Environment, University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2014 Jan 17;9(1):e80680. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0080680. eCollection 2014.
The aim of this study is to evaluate the reliability of a crowd simulation model developed by the authors by reproducing Dyer et al.'s experiments (published in Philosophical Transactions in 2009) on human leadership and consensus decision making in a computer-based environment. The theoretical crowd model of the simulation environment is presented, and its results are compared and analysed against Dyer et al.'s original experiments. It is concluded that the simulation results are largely consistent with the experiments, which demonstrates the reliability of the crowd model. Furthermore, the simulation data also reveals several additional new findings, namely: 1) the phenomena of sacrificing accuracy to reach a quicker consensus decision found in ants colonies was also discovered in the simulation; 2) the ability of reaching consensus in groups has a direct impact on the time and accuracy of arriving at the target position; 3) the positions of the informed individuals or leaders in the crowd could have significant impact on the overall crowd movement; and 4) the simulation also confirmed Dyer et al.'s anecdotal evidence of the proportion of the leadership in large crowds and its effect on crowd movement. The potential applications of these findings are highlighted in the final discussion of this paper.
本研究的目的是通过在计算机环境中重现戴尔等人（2009年发表于《哲学汇刊》）关于人类领导力和共识决策的实验，来评估作者开发的群体模拟模型的可靠性。介绍了模拟环境的理论群体模型，并将其结果与戴尔等人的原始实验进行了比较和分析。得出的结论是，模拟结果与实验结果基本一致，这证明了群体模型的可靠性。此外，模拟数据还揭示了几个新的发现，即：1）在模拟中也发现了蚁群中为了更快达成共识决策而牺牲准确性的现象；2）群体达成共识的能力对到达目标位置的时间和准确性有直接影响；3）群体中信息灵通的个体或领导者的位置可能对群体的整体运动产生重大影响；4）模拟还证实了戴尔等人关于大群体中领导力比例及其对群体运动影响的轶事证据。本文的最后讨论部分强调了这些发现的潜在应用。
