Ask YC: Do you know of any good attempts at using a social network as a brain to solve problems?

1 pointsby amichailvor 18 Jahren2 comments

One can consider each user as a neuron in such a brain. People would connect and disconnect from others as they see fit to help them solve a problem as quickly as possible. Maybe even impose a limit on the number of connections you can have to encourage high quality connections.

What do you receive from your connections? Ideas, partial solutions, etc. If someone is not contributing in this way, then people would disconnect from him/her.

Moreover, once the problem is solved, you can have some sort of credit assignment so that people/neurons who have contributed to the solution in a meaningful way receive more points.

Finally, you can have a real-time global visualization of the network so that the more active regions are easily found and you might consider connecting to people in those regions. You could even have summaries of what those active regions are thinking about (so that you can join a region that's working on a subproblem that interests you most).

2 comments

JayNeelyvor 18 Jahren

http://answers.yahoo.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/answers

http://qwizzy.com/

A main issue with these kinds of systems are that the kind of 'problems' people are best at solving don't necessarily have conclusive answers. And many people are really bad at phrasing their question/problem to begin with.

ubudesignvor 18 Jahren

nerve cell have axons with receptor sites where they recieve messages of certain types. so in your model each person/neurons needs to decide what types of messages they are willing to accept. you would need to generate those classifications and integrate your point system into it so that people/nerons become specialized in solving those types of problems.