Designing collective behavior in a group of humans using a real-time polling system and interactive evolution

Interactive evolutionary design, a powerful technique where one marries the exploratory capabilities of evolutionary computation with the aesthetic skills and domain knowledge of the human as selective agent, has been demonstrated to be an extremely powerful exploratory design method. One of interactive evolutions most promising uses is in discovering individual-level rules of behavior and interaction that will produce a desired collective pattern in a group of human or non-human agents. The problem of finding micro-rules that produce interesting macro-behavior poses significant challenges, all the more so when what constitutes "interesting" macro-behavior may not be known ahead of time. Here, the system at our disposal is a real-time crowd polling and display system, whose potential for generating interesting group behavior remains largely untapped. Additionally, because the system is capable of polling large crowds of people in real time, it presents an ideal framework within which to take advantage of a relatively unexplored form of interactive evolution - collective evolution, where the opinions of the entire group are taken into account in the design of the next generation. Collective evolution has a broad range of potential applications, including marketing research and logo and brand name design.