A Tale of Crowdsourcing and Diversity

Crowdsourcing is a hot topic recently, and I think it is a promising paradigm for solving a lot of problems. Diversity is an important phenomenon in complex systems such as the human society, and I am very interested in understanding the nature of it. Some of my previous blog posts, such as The Amazing Diversity is dedicated to this topic. In addition, our recent paper on a vulnerability disclosure program is also inspired by these two keywords. But how are these two concepts connected?

In the summer, I have read a famous Chinese Wuxia book called the Ode to Gallantry (侠客行). I found that the tale in the book serves as a perfect example for understanding crowdsourcing and diversity. I will very briefly introduce the story here, and please stop reading if you don't want to see this spoiler.

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Sometime during the ancient China, many kongfu masters will be hijacked to a mysterious island every 10 years by some mysterious guys. These masters never return. It turns out that two top kongfu masters have obtained an old martial art book with undeciphered text. They have tried hard to understand the meaning of the book, but failed. Therefore, they decide to invite (or hijack) kongfu masters and ask them to decipher it (crowdsourcing). These masters, unwilling to go to the remote island at first, will soon be attracted by the book and concentrate entirely on the decipher task. However, many years have passed and still no one has figured it out.

It is not surprise that the protagonist of this story solves the problem. The unique advantages of him are:

• He is illiterate. Therefore, he tends to understand the writing as graphs.
• He has seen a graph-based kongfu book before, and this further guides him to interpret the text as graph.
• He has little knowledge of kongfu before, and therefore does not have much prejudices and biases (the Einstellung effect).

Then, the protagonist learns the super kongfu in the book and become invincible in the world.

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We can see that the initial crowdsourcing effort fails because there is a bias. And this bias is overcame by increasing the diversity of the crowd. Here, the protagonist is drastically different from the rest and thus significantly increases the diversity of the pool. This is one reason why diversity is important to crowdsourcing.

In general, crowdsourcing is still in its infancy and we are still exploring the meaning of diversity. There are many questions to be answered.

Reference:

[1] The picture. http://pjh568.gotoip2.com/data/attachment/forum/201207/28/101235i5w4ir1hj4ik2g45.jpg