Formal Interpretation and Analysis of Collective Intelligence as Individual Intelligence

Abstract

Abstract. This paper addresses the question to what extent a process involving multiple agents that shows some form of collective intelligence can be interpreted as a single agent. The question is answered by formal analysis. It is shown for an example process how it can be conceptualised, formalised and simulated in two different manners: from a single agent (or cognitive) and from a multi-agent (or social) perspective. Moreover, it is shown how an ontological mapping can be formally defined between the two formalisations, and how this mapping can be extended to a mapping of dynamic properties. Thus it is shown how collective behaviour can be interpreted in a formal manner as single agent behaviour.

Simulation and Analysis of a Shared Extended Mind

“…As a next step, the authors are currently investigating to what extent collective processes such as ant behavior can be interpreted and formalized as single-agent processes. The first results of this research, including a formal mapping between a single-agent and a multiagent conceptualization, are described in Bosse and Treur [17]. Moreover, work is currently in progress to model other examples of the shared extended mind (outside the domain of ants).…”

“…So the isomorphism is embedding in one direction and is not a bidirectional isomorphism, simply because the observation state for m2 (and the same for the action a2) has no counterpart in the internal case. For a more detailed treatment of the isomorphism and an extension of the mapping to formally defined dynamic properties, see Bosse and Treur [17].…”