Avoiding Braess' Paradox through Collective Intelligence

In an Ideal Shortest Path Algorithm (ISPA), at each moment each router in a network sends all of its traffic down the path that will incur the lowest cost to that traffic. In the limit of an infinitesimally small amount of traffic for a particular router, its routing that traffic via an ISPA is optimal, as far as cost incurred by that traffic is concerned. We demonstrate though that in many cases, due to the side-effects of one router's actions on another routers performance, having routers use ISPA's is suboptimal as far as global aggregate cost is concerned, even when only used to route infinitesimally small amounts of traffic. As a particular example of this we present an instance of Braess' paradox for ISPA's, in which adding new links to a network decreases overall throughput. We also demonstrate that load-balancing, in which the routing decisions are made to optimize the global cost incurred by all traffic currently being routed, is suboptimal as far as global cost averaged across time is concerned. This is also due to "side-effects", in this case of current routing decision on future traffic. The theory of COllective INtelligence (COIN) is concerned precisely with the issue of avoiding such deleterious side-effects. We present key concepts from that theory and use them to derive an idealized algorithm whose performance is better than that of the ISPA, even in the infinitesimal limit. We present experiments verifying this, and also showing that a machine-learning-based version of this COIN algorithm in which costs are only imprecisely estimated (a version potentially applicable in the real world) also outperforms the ISPA, despite having access to less information than does the ISPA. In particular, this COIN algorithm avoids Braess' paradox.Comment: 28 page

Using Collective Intelligence to Route Internet Traffic

A COllective INtelligence (COIN) is a set of interacting reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms designed in an automated fashion so that their collective behavior optimizes a global utility function. We summarize the theory of COINs, then present experiments using that theory to design COINs to control internet traffic routing. These experiments indicate that COINs outperform all previously investigated RL-based, shortest path routing algorithms.Comment: 7 page

Universal low-energy properties of three two-dimensional particles

Universal low-energy properties are studied for three identical bosons confined in two dimensions. The short-range pair-wise interaction in the low-energy limit is described by means of the boundary condition model. The wave function is expanded in a set of eigenfunctions on the hypersphere and the system of hyper-radial equations is used to obtain analytical and numerical results. Within the framework of this method, exact analytical expressions are derived for the eigenpotentials and the coupling terms of hyper-radial equations. The derivation of the coupling terms is generally applicable to a variety of three-body problems provided the interaction is described by the boundary condition model. The asymptotic form of the total wave function at a small and a large hyper-radius $\rho$ is studied and the universal logarithmic dependence $\sim \ln^3 \rho$ in the vicinity of the triple-collision point is derived. Precise three-body binding energies and the $2 + 1$ scattering length are calculated.Comment: 30 pages with 13 figure

Expansion of an interacting Fermi gas

We study the expansion of a dilute ultracold sample of fermions initially trapped in a anisotropic harmonic trap. The expansion of the cloud provides valuable information about the state of the system and the role of interactions. In particular the time evolution of the deformation of the expanding cloud behaves quite differently depending on whether the system is in the normal or in the superfluid phase. For the superfluid phase, we predict an inversion of the deformation of the sample, similarly to what happens with Bose-Einstein condensates. Viceversa, in the normal phase, the inversion of the aspect ratio is never achieved, if the mean field interaction is attractive and collisions are negligible.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, final versio

Calculation of the microcanonical temperature for the classical Bose field

The ergodic hypothesis asserts that a classical mechanical system will in time visit every available configuration in phase space. Thus, for an ergodic system, an ensemble average of a thermodynamic quantity can equally well be calculated by a time average over a sufficiently long period of dynamical evolution. In this paper we describe in detail how to calculate the temperature and chemical potential from the dynamics of a microcanonical classical field, using the particular example of the classical modes of a Bose-condensed gas. The accurate determination of these thermodynamics quantities is essential in measuring the shift of the critical temperature of a Bose gas due to non-perturbative many-body effects.Comment: revtex4, 10 pages, 1 figure. v2: updated to published version. Fuller discussion of numerical results, correction of some minor error

Exact Results for Three-Body Correlations in a Degenerate One-Dimensional Bose Gas

Motivated by recent experiments we derive an exact expression for the correlation function entering the three-body recombination rate for a one-dimensional gas of interacting bosons. The answer, given in terms of two thermodynamic parameters of the Lieb-Liniger model, is valid for all values of the dimensionless coupling $\gamma$ and contains the previously known results for the Bogoliubov and Tonks-Girardeau regimes as limiting cases. We also investigate finite-size effects by calculating the correlation function for small systems of 3, 4, 5 and 6 particles.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure