THE PERFORMANCE OF COOPERATIVE PROCESSES

Computational processes in distributed networks without global controls resemble a community of concurrent agents which, in their interactions, strategies, and competition, for resources behave like whole ecologies. This brings to mind the spontaneous appearance of organized behavior in biological and social systems, where agents can engage in cooperative strategies while working on the solution of particular problems. This paper analyzes the performance characteristics of interacting processes engaged in cooperative problem solving. It shows that for a wide class of problems, there is a highly nonlinear and universal increase in performance due to the interactions between agents. In some cases this is further enhanced by sharp phase transitions in the topological structure of the problem. These results are illustrated in the context of three prototypical search examples. © 1990.