In this paper, we identify a radically new viewpoint on the collective behaviour of groups of intelligent agents. We first develop a highly general abstract model for the possible future lives that these agents may encounter as a result of their deci
sions. In the context of these possible futures, we show that the causal entropic principle, whereby agents follow behavioural rules that maximise their entropy over all paths through the future, predicts many of the observed features of social interactions between individuals in both human and animal groups. Our results indicate that agents are often able to maximise their future path entropy by remaining cohesive as a group, and that this cohesion leads to collectively intelligent outcomes that depend strongly on the distribution of the number of future paths that are possible. We derive social interaction rules that are consistent with maximum-entropy group behaviour for both discrete and continuous decision spaces. Our analysis further predicts that social interactions are likely to be fundamentally based on Webers law of response to proportional stimuli, supporting many studies that find a neurological basis for this stimulus-response mechanism, and providing a novel basis for the common assumption of linearly additive social forces in simulation studies of collective behaviour.
Background: Recent research in animal behaviour has contributed to determine how alignment, turning responses, and changes of speed mediate flocking and schooling interactions in different animal species. Here, we address specifically the problem of
what interaction responses support different nearest neighbour configurations in terms of mutual position and distance. Results: We find that the different interaction rules observed in different animal species may be a simple consequence of the relative positions that individuals assume when they move together, and of the noise inherent with the movement of animals, or associated with tracking inaccuracy. Conclusions: The anisotropic positioning of individuals with respect to their neighbours, in combination with noise, can explain several aspects of the movement responses observed in real animal groups, and should be considered explicitly in future models of flocking and schooling. By making a distinction between interaction responses involved in maintaining a preferred flock configuration, and interaction responses directed at changing it, we provide a frame to discriminate movement interactions that signal directional conflict from those underlying consensual group motion.
