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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Physics ((LNP,volume 493))

Abstract

It is widely believed that a group of cooperating agents engaged in problem solving can solve a task faster than either a single agent or the same group of agents working in isolation from each other. As a matter of fact, that cooperation leads to improvements in the performance of a group of individuals underlies the founding of the firm, the existence of scientific and professional communities, and the establishing of committees charged with solving particular problems. In the realm of computation, the emergence of massively parallel machines underscores the assumed power of concurrency for solving very complex tasks that can be decomposed into smaller pieces, and a large effort is being devoted to the design of parallel algorithms for the solution of computationally hard problems.

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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Huberman, B.A. (1997). The Power of Cooperation. In: Garrido, P.L., Marro, J. (eds) Fourth Granada Lectures in Computational Physics. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 493. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-14148-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-14148-9_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-14150-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-14148-9

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