Shirado and Christakis Published in Nature

Graduate student Hirokazu Shirado and Professor Nicholas Christakis recently published an article entitled “Locally noisy autonomous agents improve global human coordination in network experiments” in Nature. The study showed that introducing robotic software agents into human co-ordination games improved the human solution time by introducing a small amount of random behavior. The bot intervention enabled creativity because it prevented humans being stuck in a ‘rut’ wherein they tended to replicate and overly rely upon familiar interaction patterns in established interpersonal networks.  Congratulations Hiro and Nicholas!