Intelligent Collective: The Role of Diversity and Collective Cardinality

Abstract

Nowadays, there appears to be ample evidence that collectives can be intelligent if they satisfy diversity, independence, decentralization, and aggregation. Although many measures have been proposed to evaluate the quality of collective prediction, it seems that they may not adequately reflect the intelligence degree of a collective. It is due to the fact that they take into account either the accuracy of collective prediction; or the comparison between the capability of a collective to those of its members in solving a given problem. In this paper, we first introduce a new function that measures the intelligence degree of a collective. Following, we carry out simulation experiments to determine the impact of diversity on the intelligence degree of a collective by taking into account its cardinality. Our findings reveal that diversity plays a major role in leading a collective to be intelligent. Moreover, the simulation results also indicate a case in which the increase in the cardinality of a collective does not cause any significant increase in its intelligence degree.