The answers to some of the world's toughest questions could soon be crowdsourced by a computer platform.
A Melbourne University cognitive scientist is building the platform – SWARM – to use collective reasoning to solve problems.
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The Wikipedia page about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is an example of collective reasoning working well, Timothy van Gelder tells Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan.
The page provided comprehensive analysis of the various theories, evidence and reasoning behind what may have caused the MH370’s disappearance, he says.
“So we’re looking at something similar. Our question is, if you were to design a Wikipedia-like platform from the outset to support good quality reasoning, what would that be like?
“Very often for difficult problems a well-reasoned analysis is our best guide to the truth of the matter. Ultimately, this is all about finding out the truth.”
While the collective knowledge of a small number of experts working on a problem can yield results, in certain well-managed circumstances turning a problem over to a crowd (or crowd of experts) can lead to better results, Van Gelder says.
The team is using the theoretical insights from philosophers, mathematicians and others about how reasoning works and will bring it together with practical insights about what works in cloud platforms.
“There are going to be pitfalls along the way. We know that crowds can go wrong in various ways, there can be group-think, herding, there can be sabotage and trolling and astroturfing. We’ve got to think about those sorts of problems.”
An example of crowdsourcing gone wrong was the wrongful accusation of Sunil Tripathi as one of the Boston Bombers in 2013 by users of the website Reddit.
But Reddit was not designed to produce well-reasoned group analysis, Dr van Gelder says.
“It was a general platform being used in an ad hoc way. So we’re hoping that we can think about the right kinds of scaffolding and structures and incentives that would produce a better result.”
Van Gelder says the idea is that rather than building or requiring consensus, SWARM depends on diversity of thinking - even disagreement.
“Our system depends upon lots of different people passionately holding different perspectives and bringing their different arguments and their different pieces of information to bear.”
People who want to help test the platform go to the SWARM project’s website.
