My role in this experiment was that of the searcher, looking for specific tidbits of information using the internet as a resource.

At the beginning of the experiment I did not announce what my specific goal was. Being a competitive individual, I knew that my goal was to find ALL of the facts that were assigned to us. That seemed to be well communicated non-verbally, as both the agent and I became frustrated when we "gave up" looking for one particular fact, moving onto the next. As the session came to a close, and we still had not found any of the items from the list, it became obvious that our goal had changed to finding just ONE item. Even though we did not specifically communicate our intentions at the time, neither of us wanted to return to the classroom without finding at least one fact.

The human Agent and I developed an interesting relationship during the experiment. I found that at each stage of our communication, one of us was directing the search and was the effective leader at any given time. However, this leadership role was very dynamic as a matter of course. One of us would take us down a particular direction in the search, we would subsequently run into a brick wall. At that point, the leadership role would change from the Agent to Searcher or from Searcher to Agent. For the entire session, the leadership flip-flopped from one person to the next and back.

One interesting observation of my own behavior deals with when I became frustrated with our inability to find anything. My first strategy was primarily to use larger well know locations such as CNN - online, ESPN-net, or net-magazines in general. As we failed on several accounts, to find the information at these larger sites, I started to believe that the more esoteric items could only be found on more individual pages where their personal fanaticism leads them to archive more useless data. I started using Alta Vista to find home pages of people who follow specific groups with tremendous vigor. For instance, if Alta Vista listed an individual who quoted themselves to be "The #1 fan of the Toronto Maple Leaves," I choose their home page as the next search. My Agent did not necessarily agree with this pattern, and would periodically bring me back to the more well know pages.

This interaction served to decrease our overall productivity.

Gary Koerper

Karim

Takugi