Mann, RP and Garnett, R (2015) The entropic basis of collective behaviour. Interface, 12 (106). 20150037. ISSN 1742-5689
Abstract
We identify a unique viewpoint on the collective behaviour of intelligent agents. We first develop a highly general abstract model for the possible future lives these agents may encounter as a result of their decisions. In the context of these possibilities, we show that the causal entropic principle, whereby agents follow behavioural rules that maximize their entropy over all paths through the future, predicts many of the observed features of social interactions among both human and animal groups. Our results indicate that agents are often able to maximize their future path entropy by remaining cohesive as a group and that this cohesion leads to collectively intelligent outcomes that depend strongly on the distribution of the number of possible future paths. We derive social interaction rules that are consistent with maximum entropy group behaviour for both discrete and continuous decision spaces. Our analysis further predicts that social interactions are likely to be fundamentally based on Weber's law of response to proportional stimuli, supporting many studies that find a neurological basis for this stimulus-response mechanism and providing a novel basis for the common assumption of linearly additive 'social forces' in simulation studies of collective behaviour.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Keywords: | collective behaviour, maximum entropy, causal entropic principle, Galton–Watson process, Weber’s law, entropic forces |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Statistics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 08 Oct 2015 10:59 |
Last Modified: | 22 Feb 2019 09:55 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0037 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | The Royal Society |
Identification Number: | 10.1098/rsif.2015.0037 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:89133 |