Multiplicity
To me multiplicity can be defined as creating a resource from a number of resources to create an outcome. I still don’t fully understand it’s meaning but trying to explain what I can will help.
In our lecture Michael talked about in 1906 at a country fair in England scientist Francis Galton tested the crowd with a competition. After an ox had been butchered how much would is weigh? Galton got the crowd to buy tickets and guess the weight. What surprised me in the lecture was that no one got the right answer but the average/mean was 1 pound off the correct weight. So the idea of multiplicity is that a group of people have more knowledge on the one subject than an individual, so calculating the average of a group’s ideas gives us a result. I did a little research on Francis Galton and found out he was knighted in 1909.(un-useful fact)
Other examples of this is in our tutorial where we were shown a town that had one ice cream store, it sold 3 flavours but when the town discovered they could make their own flavours. This made outsiders of the town find it hard to pick which flavour they want to try the most, without trying all the flavours. A system was set up with signs out the front of each ice cream store that had the comments and ratings of people who had tried their ice cream. This would help people chose what ice cream they want to try on the other customers opinion. Examples of this are Amazon, Ebay, Itunes and other internet buying services. So by gathering comments and ratings the system can average so that others are able to see what they would like.
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