Hello reddit! We are… Josh Bongard, an associate professor in Computer Science at the University of Vermont, Mark Wagy, a PhD student working with Josh, and The DotBot, a robot collectively designed by 209 of your fellow redditors! We’re interested in how people and computers can work together to create complex technology, like robots. We just published a paper in which we demonstrate that teams of people can actually design better robots than ‘teams’ of computers, if the humans work together. Here is a summary video of this work. Better yet: try it yourself! Since we wrote that paper, we have also discovered that a combined team can do even better: intuitions from the crowd can be boiled down into models that then guide computers, allowing them to design more robots than people on their own could ever do. Ask us anything! Edit: (5:30pm EST) JB: Signing off for the day. Thanks for all your great comments and your interest in our work! Follow me here to keep abreast of new crowdsourcing results from our group.