The human in the loop: volunteer-based metacomputers as a socio-technical system

Volunteer computing is a form of distributed computing where users decide on their participation and the amount of time and other resources they will lend. This makes them an essential part of the algorithm and of the performance of the whole system. As a socio-technical system, this participation follows some patterns and in this paper we examine the result of several volunteer distributed evolutionary computation experiments and try to find out what those patterns are and what makes an experiment successful or not, including the feedback loop that is created between the users and the algorithm itself.

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