Strongly opinionated minorities can have a dramatic impact on the opinion dynamics of a large population. Two factions of inflexible minorities, polarised into two competing opinions, could lead the entire population to persistent indecision. Equivalently, populations can remain undecided when individuals sporadically change their opinion based on individual information rather than social information. Our analysis compares the cross-inhibition model with the voter model for decisions between equally good alternatives, and with the weighted voter model for decisions among alternatives characterised by different qualities. Here we show that cross-inhibition, differently from the other two models, is a simple mechanism, ubiquitous in collective biological systems, that allows the population to reach a stable majority for one alternative even in the presence of asocial behaviour. The results predicted by the mean-field models are confirmed by experiments with swarms of 100 locally interacting robots. This work suggests an answer to the longstanding question of why inhibitory signals are widespread in natural systems of collective decision making, and, at the same time, it proposes an efficient mechanism for designing resilient swarms of minimalistic robots.
翻译:有强烈观点的少数群体可以对大量人口的意见动态产生巨大影响。两个僵硬的少数群体的派系,两极分化成两种相互竞争的观点,可以导致整个人口持续不决。同样,当个人根据个人信息而不是社会信息零星地改变其观点时,人口也可以保持不决状态。我们的分析将交叉刺激模式与选民在同样好的替代品之间作出决定的模式进行比较,并与不同品质的替代品之间决策的加权选民模式进行比较。我们在这里表明,交叉干扰不同于其他两种模式,是一种简单的机制,在集体生物系统中普遍存在,使人口即使在社会行为面前也能为一种选择找到稳定的多数。平均模式所预测的结果得到了100个本地互动机器人的群数实验的证实。这项工作提出了一个长期问题,即抑制信号为什么在自然的集体决策系统中广泛存在,同时它提出了设计最弱机器人抗力的抗争力的高效机制。