Analysis of the high dimensional naming game with committed minorities

TL;DR

This paper develops a method for analyzing the high-dimensional naming game with $K=O(N)$, revealing how initial entropy and community size influence consensus time and the impact of committed minorities.

Contribution

It introduces a robust approach to study the naming game when the number of words scales with the population, highlighting the effects of initial entropy and minority influence.

Findings

High entropy states have longer consensus times.

The critical fraction of zealots decreases with more opinions.

Committed minorities more easily dominate highly diverse systems.

Abstract

The naming game has become an archetype for linguistic evolution and mathematical social behavioral analysis. In the model presented here, there are $N$ individuals and $K$ words. Our contribution is developing a robust method that handles the case when $K = O(N)$. The initial condition plays a crucial role in the ordering of the system. We find that the system with high Shannon entropy has a higher consensus time and a lower critical fraction of zealots compared to low-entropy states. We also show that the critical number of committed agents decreases with the number of opinions and grows with the community size for each word. These results complement earlier conclusions that diversity of opinion is essential for evolution; without it, the system stagnates in the status quo [S. A. Marvel et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 118702 (2012)]. In contrast, our results suggest that committed minorities can more easily conquer highly diverse systems, showing them to be inherently unstable.