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[eng] Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions, cultural traits, and even scientific progress. Examples of collective behavior can be observed in activities like the Wikipedia and Linux, where individuals aggregate their knowledge for the benefit of the community, and citizen science, where the potential of collectives to solve complex problems is exploited. Here, we conducted an online experiment to investigate the performance of a collective when solving a guessing problem in which each actor is endowed with partial information and placed as the nodes of an interaction network. We measure the performance of the collective in terms of the temporal evolution of the accuracy, finding no statistical difference in the performance for two classes of networks, regular lattices and random networks. We also determine that a Bayesian description captures the behavior pattern the individuals follow in aggregating information from neighbors to make decisions. In comparison with other simple decision models, the strategy followed by the players reveals a suboptimal performance of the collective. Our contribution provides the basis for the micro-macro connection between individual based descriptions and collective phenomena.

Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions, cultural traits, and even scientific progress. Examples of collective behavior can be observed in activities like the Wikipedia and Linux, where individuals aggregate their knowledge for the benefit of the community, and citizen science, where the potential of collectives to solve complex problems is exploited. Here, we conducted an online experiment to investigate the performance of a collective when solving a guessing problem in which each actor is endowed with partial information and placed as the nodes of an interaction network. We measure the performance of the collective in terms of the temporal evolution of the accuracy, finding no statistical difference in the performance for two classes of networks, regular lattices and random networks. We also determine that a Bayesian description captures the behavior pattern the individuals follow in aggregating information from neighbors to make decisions. In comparison with other simple decision models, the strategy followed by the players reveals a suboptimal performance of the collective. Our contribution provides the basis for the micro-macro connection between individual based descriptions and collective phenomena. ; The authors acknowledge support from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and FEDER (EU) through the projects MODASS (FIS2011-24785) (VME) and INTENSE@COSYP (FIS2012-30634). TP acknowledges support from the program Juan de la Cierva of MINECO. ; Peer Reviewed

OCIS codes: (140.3560) Lasers, ring; (140.5960) Semiconductor lasers; (200.4660) Optical logic.-- Final full-text version of the paper available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OE.15.012941. ; Semiconductor ring lasers display a variety of dynamical regimes originating from the nonlinear competition between the clockwise and counter-clockwise propagating modes. In particular, for large pumping the system has a bistable regime in which two stationary quasiunidirectional counter-propagating modes coexist. Bistability is induced by cross-gain saturation of the two counter-propagating modes being stronger than the self-saturation and can be used for data storage when the semiconductor ring laser is addressed with an optical pulse. In this work we study the response time when an optical pulse is injected in order to make the system switch from one mode to the counter-propagating one. We also determine the optimal pulse energy to induce switching. ; This work has been funded by the Spanish MEC and Feder under project TEC2006-10009/MIC (Conoce 2) and FIS2004-00953 (PhoDeCC), by the European Community under projects IST-2005-34743 (IOLOS) and IST-2005-34551 (PICASSO), and by the Balear Government under project PROGECIB-5A (QULMI). T.P. acknowledges support from the Govern Balear (Spain). A.S. acknowledges Ramón y Cajal program by MEC. G.V. is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).