Modern scientific research has become largely a cooperative activity in the Internet age. We build a simulation model to understand the population-level creativity based on the heuristic ant colony algorithm. Each researcher has two heuristic parameters characterizing the goodness of his own judgments and his trust on literature. In a population with all kinds of researchers, we find that as the problem scale increases, the contributor distribution significantly shifts from the independent regime of relying on one's own judgments to the cooperative regime of more closely following the literature. The distribution also changes with the stage of the research problem and the computing power available. Our work provides some preliminary understanding and guidance for the dynamical process of cooperative scientific research in various disciplines.

中文翻译：

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蚁群算法启发的合作科研模型

在互联网时代，现代科学研究已成为很大程度上的合作活动。我们建立了一个基于启发式蚁群算法的模拟模型，以了解人口水平的创造力。每个研究人员都有两个启发式参数，分别代表他自己的判断力和对文学的信任。在拥有各种研究人员的人群中，我们发现，随着问题规模的增加，贡献者的分布已从依赖于自己的判断的独立机制转变为更紧密地遵循文献的合作机制。分布也随着研究问题的阶段和可用的计算能力而变化。我们的工作为各个学科的合作科学研究的动态过程提供了一些初步的理解和指导。