Collective intelligence for control of distributed dynamical systems

We consider the El Farol bar problem, also known as the minority game (W. B. Arthur, The American Economic Review, 84(2): 406–411 (1994), D. Challet and Y.C. Zhang, Physica A, 256:514 (1998)). We view it as an instance of the general problem of how to configure the nodal elements of a distributed dynamical system so that they do not “work at cross purposes”, in that their collective dynamics avoids frustration and thereby achieves a provided global goal. We summarize a mathematical theory for such configuration applicable when (as in the bar problem) the global goal can be expressed as minimizing a global energy function and the nodes can be expressed as minimizers of local free energy functions. We show that a system designed with that theory performs nearly optimally for the bar problem. 1