Interaction and Collective Intelligence on the Internet

Abstract

Network interconnection, information interoperability, and crowds interaction on the Internet could inspire better computation models than Turing machine, since that human plays an important factor in Internet computing, so that the human-machine and machine-machine interactions have evolved to be the kernel of Internet computing. Internet has not been simply equivalent to a virtual huge computer, or a set of computers. On the Internet, human’s behaviors are uncertain, the interactions and influence among people are also uncertain. These uncertainties cannot be described by Turing machine and traditional interaction machine. As a new computation platform, Internet computing requires new theories and methods. By combining topology in mathematics with the field theory in physics, we propose the topological potential approach, which set up a virtual field by the topological space to reflect individual activities, local effects and preferential attachments. This approach can be used to research the emergence of collective intelligence. Here, we introduce three case studies to illustrate the analysis on the collective intelligence on the Internet and discuss some potential applications of the topological potential approach.