New strategy of the shill: ‘consistent moving’

The collective behavior of a multi-agent system is the macroscopic phenomenon, such as swarm intelligence, flocking, synchronization, pattern formation, etc. This paper addresses the problem of `soft-control´: how to coordinate the collective behavior of multi-agent systems where the interaction rules of the already-existing agents can not be re-designed. One possible way to is to add one or a few `shills´ which can be designed differently from the normal agent, but is treated as a normal agent by the other normal ones. As a case study, we propose a new strategy for the shill, called `consistent moving´, for the purpose of synchronization of the Vicsek´s model. This strategy avoids the limitation of `cheating heading´ in previous work. The computer simulation shows that it is possible for a `clever´ shill with `consistent moving´ strategy can change the collective behavior of a group.