Asynchronous teams : near-scale-effective organizations for distributed, computer-based agents

Abstract: "An asynchronous team (A-Team) is a strongly cyclic computational network of autonomous agents and shared memories. Results circulate through this network. Agents cooperate by working on one another's results. There is a growing body of evidence that such networks are extremely effective in solving optimization problems. Moreover, they seem to benefit from increases in scale: big networks are more effective than small ones. This article explains why."