The Wisdom of Crowds
August 31, 2005
I was fiddling around with my original Blogger-based blog this afternoon and noticed something new. At the top of the page there was an icon called "Flag". Apparently Google has instituted a mechanism through which they can unlist objectionable content (the blog is still available but won't be publicized through Blogspot). They reference a book entitled The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. According to Surowiecki, "decentralized decisions can be vastly better than experts (or the public) expect them to be, or even than any one expert can make." There are some caveats though -- if the decision structures in place are too centralized, too decentralized, or too imitative in nature they can distort the wisdom of the crowds.
Interestingly enough, we seem to be going through an inflection point (to quote Andy Grove) in the verification industry related to what types of tools and methodologies we use. Are we acting as a wise crowd would -- soon to come up with some outstanding solutions to the worlds verification issues -- or are our thought processes being distorted by the structure of the EDA industry and the marketing gurus at the Big Three? Government agencies have talked about using futures markets to predict things like where terrorists are going to strike or where hurricanes will make landfall. Maybe we need something similar to help us wade through the muddied-waters of the verification marketplace and focus on the most promising new technologies.