Naming Game with Multi-Hearers or Group Discussions

Abstract

As global consensus is the ultimate state that the entire population are pursuing, perhaps unintentionally and unconsciously, one possible direction to improve the naming game models is to facilitate their convergence speeds. It is typically assumed that in an naming game model there are only two agents, a speaker and a hearer, involved in a local interaction at each time step of the iterative process. However, this is not always the real case in human communications, where broadcasting and group discussion are very common. Broadcasting means that there is one speaker sending out a message to multiple hearers simultaneously, for example, in a TV show or a conference presentation. In this chapter, therefore, a more realistic situation with multiple hearers is considered in a naming game model; that is, when a speaker utters a name, there are several hearers listening to it at the same time. Such a naming game with multiple hearers (MHNG) extends the minimal naming game model from the one-to-one local communication scenario to the one-to-many setting. In the one-to-many broadcasting framework, a same word is sent to multiple hearers towards local consensus simultaneously, which encourages the emergence of a dominant name in the population, thus facilitates the information propagation within the population.