I really dislike this story. All I got from it was that this guy loves to stroke his own ego. WTF. The worst of it is that this story got so many points and that people are really lapping it up.
In a nutshell: Make very agent a bit different in the sense that they all won't make the exact same choices. i.e. Rather than have a human always choose the first source, vary this and have some humans that go for the fifth and others for the sixth, etc. etc. Your random selection would also work I guess. Although how well? I don't know.
Then, have a global pattern of how everything should be working, more or less. When a major deviation is found from the global pattern, adjust. How exactly? Those are implementation details.