Breaking Indecision in Multiagent, Multioption Dynamics

How does a group of agents break indecision when deciding about options with qualities that are hard to distinguish? Biological and artificial multiagent systems, from honeybees bird flocks bacteria, robots, humans, often need overcome choosing among in situations which the performance or even survival is at stake. Breaking also important because fully indecisive state, where not biased toward any specific option, agent maximally sensitive prone adapt inputs changes its environment. Here, we develop mathematical theory study how decisions arise breaking indecision. Our approach grounded both equivariant network bifurcation theory. We model decision as synchrony-breaking influence networks each node value assigned by an option. First, show three universal behaviors, namely, deadlock, consensus, dissensus, generic outcomes bifurcations synchronous state networks. Second, all deadlock consensus patterns some dissensus predicted symmetry Third, there many “exotic” patterns. These architecture but symmetries through new branching lemma. This first example exotic solutions application. Numerical simulations novel illustrate our theoretical results.