Experiments in Social Computation - C4 Public Lectures

Explore the intersection of computation theory, economics, and social computing in this 88-minute lecture from the Santa Fe Institute's C4 Public Lectures series. Delve into Michael Kearns' research on distributed social computation through controlled human-subject experiments in networks with limited local communication. Discover how traditional computational problems like graph coloring, consensus, independent set, market equilibria, biased voting, and network formation are reimagined as strategic interaction games. Gain insights into the behavioral findings from these experiments and compare them to predictions from computation theory and microeconomics. Learn about the potential of crowdsourcing and social computing to tackle increasingly complex problems beyond simple parallelization.

Introduction
Graph Coloring Problem
Experimental Framework
Experiments
Birds Eye View
Questions
Consensus Experiments
Individual and Collective Behavior
Color and Consensus
Experimental Results