A hypothetical set of interactions in the crowd/machine team.

<p>Participant 1 designs a robot (a) and then allows an optimization method to program his robot once on his computer (b). (The red and blue body segments oscillate in anti-phase with each other, resulting in a small amount of forward travel indicated by the gray arrow.) Participant 1 allows the optimizer to re-program the robot (c), hoping its behavior will improve. Participant 387 sees and likes this design, so she allows the optimizer to try again on her computer (d). Meanwhile, participant 2 designs a different robot (e) and performs one round of optimization on it (f). Later, several more participants also contribute computational effort to this design (g,h). After observing the quality of participant 2’s design, participant 1 abandons his original design and attempts to improve on participant 2’s robot by creating a larger variant of it (i). After performing an initial round of optimization on it (j), several more participants confirm the quality of this design (k,l).