series East of Eden where a social network of roughly 10,000 individuals came up with ideas to stop missiles in a very short span of time. Wisdom of Crowds would have a significant influence on the naming of the crowdsourcing creative company Tongal, which is an anagram for Galton, the last name of the social-scientist highlighted in the introduction to Surowiecki's book. Francis Galton recognized the ability of a crowd's averaged weight-guesses for oxen to exceed the accuracy of experts. Criticism In his book Embracing the Wide Sky, Daniel Tammet finds fault with this notion. Tammet points out the potential for problems in systems which have poorly defined means of pooling knowledge: Subject matter experts can be overruled and even wrongly punished by less knowledgeable persons in crowd sourced systems, citing a case of this on Wikipedia. Furthermore, Tammet mentions the assessment of the accuracy of Wikipedia as described in a study mentioned in Nature in 2005, outlining several flaws in the study's methodology which included that the study made no distinction between minor errors and large errors. Tammet also cites the Kasparov versus the World, an online competition that pitted the brainpower of tens of thousands of online chess players choosing moves in a match against Garry Kasparov, which was won by Kasparov, not the "crowd". Although Kasparov did say, "It is the greatest game in the history of chess. The sheer number of ideas, the complexity, and the contribution it has made to chess make it the most important game ever played." In his book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier argues that crowd wisdom is best suited for problems that involve optimization, but ill-suited for problems that require creativity or innovation. In the online article Digital Maoism, Lanier argues that the collective is more likely to be smart only when 1. it is not defining its own questions, 2. the goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a single numeric value), and 3. the information system which informs the collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on individuals to a high degree. Lanier argues that only under those circumstances can a collective be smarter than a person. If any of these conditions are broken, the collective becomes unreliable or worse. Iain Couzin, a professor in Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Albert Kao, his student,