Many-Body Theory for Multi-Agent Complex Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a many-body physics-inspired formalism to analyze multi-agent complex systems, revealing that their dynamics are governed by 'Crowd-Anticrowd' quasiparticles, with applications demonstrated on the Minority Game.

Contribution

It introduces a novel many-body theory framework for multi-agent systems, connecting physics concepts with complex system dynamics.

Findings

Analytic expressions match numerical simulations for the Minority Game.

Behavior dominated by 'Crowd-Anticrowd' quasiparticles.

Formal analogy between multi-agent dynamics and many-body physics.

Abstract

Multi-agent complex systems comprising populations of decision-making particles, have wide application across the biological, informational and social sciences. We uncover a formal analogy between these systems' time-averaged dynamics and conventional many-body theory in Physics. Their behavior is dominated by the formation of 'Crowd-Anticrowd' quasiparticles. For the specific example of the Minority Game, our formalism yields analytic expressions which are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations.