The main paradigms of social computation

Abstract

In its primary form of connectionist paradigms, social computation raised in the eighties of the last century with the role of bringing an answer to the failure of the parallel computation as a general way of overcoming the speed limits of sequential computers. In that time these limits where mainly theoretical, encountered when people did try to solve exactly combinatorial optimization problems such as crew scheduling or bin packing. The general solution was: if we are not able to define a procedure solving the problem in a feasible time, let the computer find by itself a good solution in a way bearable by its computing resources. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.