Crystal Crop Fever

• Human problem-solving behavior in an optimization task. 
• The conditions that affect the exploration-exploitation tradeoff.

Introduction

How do you find the highest peak in a mountainous landscape (like the Alps)? The answer seems easy: you go to the base of the highest mountain (in this case the Mont Blanc) and start climbing. But what if you didn’t know which was the highest one (and google was not an option)? Again, the answer seems trivial: you look around and find the one which looks the tallest. You need to correct for the perspective, but if you get that one right, soon you are well on your way. But what if the landscape is covered in thick fog? How does one find the highest peak in a landscape, when one doesn’t know where to look?

It turns out that a lot of the most challenging problems (find examples here) can be described as a landscape, where each point in the landscape represents a solution and the height of the landscape is given by how good the solution is. This is good because, in principle, if you know how to search, then you can solve ANY problem: you could use the same method you used to find the peak in the alps to determine which solutions to test.

Crystal Crop Fever studies how teams search for the highest peak in the problem landscapes, how do we influence each other and how do we divide the tasks between us. With this we aim to improve the conditions in order to facilitate efficient teamwork in a general setting.