Collective Phenomena and Non-Finite State Computation in a Human Social System
Figure 1
Distribution of consecutive C (“cooperative”) events in the edit history of the most-edited article on the English-language Wikipedia, George_W._Bush. Solid histogram: actual data. Red/solid line: maximum-likelihood fit for the three-parameter collective state (CS) model of Eq. 6, preferred over the sum of exponential model (nEXP) of Eq. 2. The blue/dashed and green/dotted lines show the one and two component finite-state approximations to the Collective State model. The finite state model approximates the collective state model in this data at four components (eight parameters), at which point it is strongly disfavored as non-parsimonious by Bayesian model selection. Bottom. Contributions to (log-likelihood relative to collective state) for the one, two, and three component fits (blue/dashed, green/dotted and yellow/solid, respectively).