Over The Counter Culture

Jeff Howe is working on a book about crowdsourcing. He posts extracts because he’s fishing for comments (which he will integrate into his book, probably as an appendix) – so I feel it’s OK to repost an extract of his extract, if it incites you to ‘pay the goddamn man’ by heading over to his blog and leaving your thoughts: http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2008/05/chapter-6-the-m.html

In these few paragraphs he introduces the idea of addictive collaboration. It describes the use of openly competitive ‘ripoff’ collaboration in a programming competition. Yesterday on Fred Wilson’s blog I described innovation as an evolutionary/meme-remixing process (by analogy to DNA gene remixing to create new genes). Below is the description of an interesting offshoot scenario where incrementalism as the dominant mode of innovation has been totally acknowledged (not hidden behind the false pretence of originality) in a contest. This contest could be won by even the most minor tweaks of another competitior’s code. It led to a stunningly efficient, competitive and productive process.

Contestants were required to solve what is commonly called a “traveling salesman problem,” the classic example of which asks for the shortest possible round trip a salesman can take through a given list of cities. Participants submitted a solution in the form of an algorithm, or computer code that directed the salesman through a number of steps. The contest ended after ten days, at which point the most efficient algorithm would be declared the winner.

But Gulley added an extra twist: Participants were allowed to steal each other’s code in order to create a better solution. Every time a new solution was sent in, it was quickly scored, ranked and posted to the Web site. Every other contestant could then see the programming code, in full. They could cut-and-paste the best bits and resubmit it with any improvements, however minor. If the tweaks, as Gulley calls them, created a more efficient algorithm, it vaulted the contestant into first place, even if he or she had only changed a few lines of code.

The result, Gulley says, closely resembles the actual process of software development. “In an office full of developers, if one person solves a problem, everyone else will gather around to see how they did it, have their ‘a ha’ moment, then factor it into their own code,” he says. “There’s a pervasive myth of Thomas Edison in our culture. The smart guy who’ll get us out of this fix, who’ll walk into a room and come out with a brilliant solution.” In reality, most breakthroughs are the product of teamwork. “I wanted to create a contest that more accurately modeled the way ideas really move through the world.”

Far from alienating MATLAB users, encouraging outright theft has inspired ever-greater levels of obsessive effort on their part. Nathan, a contestant from Ireland, wrote Gulley to note that he was afflicted by “physical trembling while making the final preparations to submit code.” The most devoted players schedule vacations around it, or even cut classes and use sick days in the race to be at the top of the leader board. Gulley believes the MATLAB contest falls into a new category of competition he calls “addictive collaboration.” The way it works, Gulley says, is that one programmer will spend all night devising a brilliant algorithm that takes the lead. “Then someone comes along, adds a little tweak and then they go into first place. The first programmer is like, ‘That asshole! He just cut me off by copying my code!’ And so the first programmer adds another tweak in order to regain the lead.’” The ultimate goal, Gulley says, isn’t to win. It’s to come up with a brilliant tweak that will impress the other competitors. “It’s like a shadow scoring system based on reputation.”

But the extraordinary aspect of MATLAB isn’t the fervor it inspires, but the fact that the ten-day hurly-burly—in which all intellectual property is thrown into the public square to be used and re-used at will—turns out to be an insanely efficient method of problem solving. The contest has been held twice a year since its inception in 1999. On average, Gulley notes, the best algorithm at the end of the contest period exceeds the best algorithm from day one by a magnitude of 1000.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.