HuGoS: a virtual environment for studying collective human behavior from a swarm intelligence perspective

Abstract

Swarm intelligence studies self-organized collective behavior resulting from interactions between individuals, typically in animals and artificial agents. Some studies from cognitive science have also demonstrated self-organization mechanisms in humans, often in pairs. Further research into the topic of human swarm intelligence could provide a better understanding of new behaviors and larger human collectives. This requires studies with multiple human participants in controlled experiments in a wide variety of scenarios, where a rich scope of possible interactions can be isolated and captured. In this paper, we present HuGoS—‘Humans Go Swarming’—a multi-user virtual environment implemented using the Unity game development platform, as a comprehensive tool for experimentation in human swarm intelligence. We demonstrate the functionality of HuGoS with naïve participants in a browser-based implementation, in a coordination task involving collective decision-making, messaging and signaling, and stigmergy. By making HuGoS available as open-source software, we hope to facilitate further research in the field of human swarm intelligence.

Learning from humans to build social cognition among robots

“…Figure 2D shows that participants continued to place more blocks at a roughly constant rate throughout the experiment, implying that no bottleneck arose in their self-organized coordination. The figure also shows that the expansion of both spills had successfully been stopped at around 200 s. For more information on this and similar experiments, please refer to Coucke et al. (2021) .…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, no off-the-shelf virtual environment was available to meet these requirements, so we built a tool in Unity3D called “HuGoS: Humans Go Swarming” ( Coucke et al., 2020 ; 2021 ) that we could use to study human behavior in embodied scenarios similar to those in which robots operate. To illustrate the features that we propose for a virtual environment for studying transferable social cognition, we describe two example experimental setups in HuGoS.…”

“…Future robot swarms should be able to build complex structures in dynamically changing environments ( Dorigo et al., 2020 ). In our example “lava spill task” scenario in Coucke et al. (2021) , human social behaviors in collective construction scenarios can be observed.…”

“…(E) Data such as the avatar trajectories can be used to analyze how participants coordinate the placement of blocks. Figures (B–D) adapted from Coucke et al. (2021) under license CC BY 4.0.…”

Virtual Intelligence: A Systematic Review of the Development of Neural Networks in Brain Simulation Units

“…However, this does not mean they should only reduce the explanation of consciousness or mental activities to their biological roots. Scientific advances show the possibility of exploring this enigmatic activity with new techniques and technologies that would make it possible to decode a vital part of this phenomenon [ 17 , 18 ]. One of the aims is to elaborate more specific explanations of the operation of this activity or emergent property of human life.…”