Crowd Targeting
A Targeting strategy. Tap into the Wisdom of the Crowd. Inspired by
The book says to stop hunt for the expert and instead tap into the collective wisdom of the group. Even if the group consists of mainly non-experts, in the long run they will outperform the expert as long as some conditions are met. The conditions are (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds):
- Diversity of opinion - Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
- Independence - People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
- Decentralization - People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
- Aggregation - Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
The magic works through a mathematical truism stating that the error margin shrinks with each added sample. Each answer consists of part information, part error. The more answers the less the error gets and in theory the collective information approaches the real answer.
See also:
- VirtualGuns (for which CrowdTargeting tries to be an alternative).
- CrowdMovement
The Targeting problem domain
CrowdTargeting, then, tries to not focus too hard on finding the one gun that knows best where to fire. But rather tries to keep a crowd of semi-good guns and then simply averages the answer received from each gun in the crowd.
Used by
- CassiusClay (at least the "Swarm" versions).
