Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Japan.
Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Elife. 2019 Feb 12;8:e41328. doi: 10.7554/eLife.41328.
How can a human collective coordinate, for example to move a banquet table, when each person is influenced by the inertia of others who may be inferior at the task? We hypothesized that large groups cannot coordinate through touch alone, accruing to a zero-sum scenario where individuals inferior at the task hinder superior ones. We tested this hypothesis by examining how dyads, triads and tetrads, whose right hands were physically coupled together, followed a common moving target. Surprisingly, superior individuals followed the target accurately even when coupled to an inferior group, and the interaction benefits increased with the group size. A computational model shows that these benefits arose as each individual uses their respective interaction force to infer the collective's target and enhance their movement planning, which permitted coordination in seconds independent of the collective's size. By estimating the collective's movement goal, its individuals make physical interaction beneficial, swift and scalable.
当每个人都受到其他人的惯性影响，而这些人可能在任务上表现较差时，人类集体如何协调，例如移动宴会桌？我们假设，大型群体无法仅通过触摸进行协调，这导致了一种零和场景，即任务表现较差的个体阻碍了表现较好的个体。我们通过检查双手物理连接在一起的双人、三人组和四人组如何跟随共同的移动目标来检验这一假设。令人惊讶的是，即使与表现较差的群体相连，表现较好的个体也能准确地跟随目标，并且随着群体规模的增加，相互作用的益处也会增加。一个计算模型表明，这些好处是由于每个个体利用各自的相互作用力来推断集体的目标并增强他们的运动规划而产生的，这使得协调可以在几秒钟内独立于集体的规模而发生。通过估计集体的运动目标，其个体可以使物理交互变得有益、迅速且可扩展。
