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Will Billions Of Nodes Need Biologic Networking?
Stephen Bamattre writes: "There is an interesting research project at the University of California,
Irvine, that attempts to create a new concept of networking and distributed
architecture, using biological concepts. Interesting, it may a more viable
network design for rapid growth. Maybe, some day, we can really
kill processes. Check out the paper here." From their overview: "We believe that large scale biological systems, such as the bee or ant colony, have already developed many of the mechanisms needed to satisfy these requirements. We have identified several key principles and mechanisms in these biological systems, and we are now applying them to the design of network services and applications." Surely not a new idea, but a little more concrete as described here than the usual "network is alive" metaphors. The paper is in compressed PostScript and as a Word file.
Am I the only one who can see the possible dangers inherent in this kind of large-scale attempt to mimic biological behavioural mechanisms? Is the hubris of these scientists so great that they have ignored the possible consequences, or have they just forgotten in their rush to experiment with a new toy?
Given any system of sufficient complexity and flexibility we have the possibility of real intelligence arising as part of an emergent phenomenon. And since this system is designed to mimic known biological mechanisms involved in conscioussness and thought, it is even more likely that it will become intelligent once a critical threshold of complexity has been reached. And given the explosive growth we see in networked appliances of all kinds, this threshold cannot be too far into the future.
What would be the consequences of a large scale network such as the internet suddenly developing intelligence? We cannot be sure, but at the very least it would cause the collapse of economies, which are tied more and more to the unimpeded and guaranteed flow of information across the globe. And given that it would be able to access the sum of human evil and hate as stored in many places on the net, would it look benevolently upon its creators? I doubt it, and I worry about what would follow.
For a good book detailing the dangers of this kind of biological computer, read Distress by Greg Egan. This subject is worth a lot more thought before it can be allowed to proceed.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
However, packet-switching, as used in the original ARPANET and today's Internet, was invented by Paul Baran at the RAND corporation, and one of the rationales in his original paper was indeed survivability of nuclear wars.
(Unfortunately, I posted this previously as Anonymous Coward, due to a longstanding Slashdot bug I'd forgotten to work around.)
The Internet's routing protocols don't seem particularly hive-like to me, but I haven't been able to read the paper yet to see what the researchers mean --- it's apparently been slashdotted.
Bah. It sounded cool, but the server is pegged out with too many users. So my comment will end up being off topic, even though I intended to make the smart-ass remark and then read the article, then add something relevant and interesting to my post.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
In the "new research" portion of last year's SIGCOMM, there was a talk called "Let Fireflies Light Your Way". They talked about building a distributed braking system for trains (and proving its convergence to a 'correct' solution, grin) and mapping similar ideas to flow control and routing for faster convergence to stable behavior. Pretty cool stuff, and the talk is available via the mbone - go here and look at session 5, talk "5-1,2-ali,barford".
Well, some of us aren't in the USA, and over here it's past midday.
Not all Slashdotters are living in the same time-zone ya know.
My Journal
If NNs are more powerful than TMs does that mean
Church's thesis is wrong? Or am I just totally
confused.
Yeah, neural networks are extremely interesting stuff.
Several of them are great at learning patterns (radial basis, Kohonen nets) while others are terriffic at learning non-linear mappings and formulae (back-propagation, probabilistic nets, cascade correlation nets).
The major problems are slowing training speed and the "plasticity" dilemma. Slow training times can be dealt with by several different methods, like partial pre-training and optimized learning algorithms. But the plasticity dilemma is tougher. The problem is that networks that learn easily and quickly also "forget" quickly (i.e. they are too plastic) but networks that don't are "fragile" and don't adapt well to new patterns that weren't in the original training set.
Unfortunately the entire neural network field, which was on its way to blossom in the early 1970's, was largely ignore after a paper by Marvin Minsky ("Perceptrons" by Minsky and Pappert) mathematically proved that a limited form of early neural network (the perceptron) couldn't learn things that were linearly inseparable (like XOR). This pretty much killed the field for 15 years and we are just now beginning to catch up.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
The slashdot team could just add categories for other countries than United States. Users could then filter out categories the normal way (preferences) to block irrelevant info.
Wouldn't it be nice to see all the news there is already _and_ some local stuff like events or local law issues.
-- my 7XL is not yet invented
"Hmmm, I don't see that in his post."
Well, I was taking the comment re: efficiency to be about Turing-equivalence.
"...programming languages for NN..."
I'd be interested in some links to information on this if you have them.
I've done a lot of semi-serious reading about AI over a number of years. I've also done some messing around with various programming bits. I'm (fairly) well aware of the newer, biology/complex-systems based approaches. But I was totally unaware that anyone had tried using NNs for anything but memory-type uses.
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I was thinking about putting this in an Ask Slashdot, but since we are already on the topic of "biologic networking", I think I'll slide over by a half-topic and ask here.
I understand that in 1943 McCulloch and Pitts proved that neural networks are Turing Machine equivalent. But I have (at least) two questions:
1) Where can I find details on how to transform a given TM to an NN? Did they just construct AND, NOT and OR gates (or maybe just NAND) and make enormous non-efficient networks? Which leads me to:
2) Did they (M & P [or for that matter anyone since]) exploit the power of NNs? That is, did their TM NNs incorporate the recognitive and associative properties that people use NNs for today?
The reason I ask is: I'm interested in AI. I'm trying to create a Turing-complete computer constructed from an NN (or NNs) that I can then create a programming language for. My hope is that this language/computer combo will have some natural features that make some aspects of AI easier.
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"Prove to the world that security through increased regulation is never the answer."
Normally I don't respond to trolls and offtopic posters, BUT....
The above quote is EXACTLY what I said when logins became a requirement. I said it again when moderation showed up. The situation has gotten worse and worse.
Now even the TROLLS have picked up on the idea. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before Slashdot finally understands OR fades away to ZDNet-like unimportance.
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Technology seems to evolve in the way of trying to do the same things as nature. maybe tomorrow's computers will act like brains, with multidimentional computations and data, and maybe the human network will be just what animals or insects evolved to million years ago... will they still be here when we'd get there?? (Read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac!)
We already have such thing. It is called the hampsterdance.
It is performed by geeks whenever they are scared or hurt. It alerts other geeks which will run away screaming. It is especially powerfull when performed in groups.
As with many behavioural paterns a symbolized incarnation of this dance is part of the geeks mating dance. At special events (eg a major kernel release) young geeks gather in a terminal room and dance the dance from 0:00 to 6:00AM. Regional variants include waving with PDA's, drinking coke and connecting ethernet cable.
Don't you think we could learn from that to improve computer science?
When I look at that, I'm not sure if it's beautiful, and nor am I sure that computer science will improve if we make it look more like him.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
I'm not going to address intelligence until someone defines it. Emergence, OTOH, is both well defined and well described mathematically, thanks to people like Hermann Haken. That this fact is virtually unknown even among supporters of the idea is surely no evidence that it doesn't exist.
"Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world."
Of course not. Luckily we have other forms of monism to fall back on, so this isn't really a problem.
"He ascribes the power of thinking to matter instead of to himself."
I'm sorry, but this is so obviously wrong I don't know where to begin. First, he is assuming that he is material, so even by ascribing thought to himself, he would be ascribing it to matter. Steiner is assuming thought is immaterial, not arguing for it.
Second, he isn't ascribing thought to matter, but to interactions between material objects. This is the same mistake as believing that 'driving' must be an inherent part of a car's physical makeup -- that cars can't drive unless all of their quarks can drive as well.
"The materialist has turned his attention away from the definite subject, his own I, and has arrived at an image of something quite vague and indefinite."
Oh please. You know, philosophy has advanced a bit in the last century, it would be nice if everyone would come and join us. If you were going to pick something in which to ground a criticism of materialism, you could at least choose experience or intentionality. There's every indication that the self will be explained psychologically.
-jcl
You've obviously never read Genesis ;-)
" it follows that intelligence that is not created in God's form does not have a soul."
Not necessarily. God could grant souls to human creations, if He liked. In fact, since we have no idea what a soul is, it would seem that God would have to intervene if our AI were ever to have one.
"it thus follows that they cannot help but act against it instead."
Again, not necessarily. You can act in accordance with the wishes of an agent you don't know exists. You could condition the AI to mimic the thoughts and behavior of the Pope (not any specific Pope, of course), resulting in a being that is both following God's will and utterly unaware of that fact. (Yes, I know this doesn't count.
"Think about it.
I'd be much for interested in thinking about why you believe theology has any place in a discussion of AI at this point. Regardless of what else it may be, AI (the term is deprecated, if anyone cares) is an empirical science. If you create something that acts like a human, you have very likely found an insight about mankind. In the same vein, creating an AI would have a profound impact (always wanted to say that ;-) on theology. What if, by some miracle, the AI wasn't evil? What if it was utterly saintly, personally blessed by God, and sent to teach us about His ways? That would empirical evidence that God approved its existence, and that He has a somewhat more flexible view of the universe that His misguided children.
All of this is academic, though, since I don't believe in God, evil, or that AI's are going to jump out of our networks.
-jcl
I am more than the sum of my parts? Cool!
*shrug* It's not that big a deal. Emergence has been extensively studied this century, in both natural and artificial settings.
Consciousness in a psychological sense, which seems to what is being discussed here, is so poorly defined that using it is just inviting misunderstanding. You can't call it a 'level of complexity', because some people associate introspection with being conscious, and it's hard to see how a level of anything could introspect, or how introspection could lead to massive qualitative changes in complexity.
There's also a problem with equating consciousness with unpredictability. In general, conscious behavior is no more unpredictable than anything other human quality, and far more predictable than, say, the weather. At the same time, the behavior of presumable less complex elements of the brain can be virtually impossible to predict -- thus the great mystery of the unconscious mind. The related 'willful behavior' theory falls apart when you consider how many things in the world appear to act of desires similar to those of animals. Surface tension can be readily anthropomorphized into a desire on the part of a substance to stay whole, for example.
At any rate, the sort of intuitive notions of consciousness that most people seem to have should apply to most animals higher up the evolutionary ladder than lizards, and possible quite a bit lower. Dogs seem to be self-aware (if not capable of introspection), certainly possess emotions, exhibit complex behavior, socialize -- in short, they seem to meet all of the various criteria for being conscious.
-jcl
if man is so smart, how come he has to look to "dumb nature" for ideas that were already implemented and perfected for endless ages already. i guess we can always learn more -- but from where did the original knowledge and intuition come from then???
johnrpenner.
| Given any system of sufficient complexity and flexibility we
| have the possibility of real intelligence arising as part of
| an emergent phenomenon. And since this system is designed to
| mimic known biological mechanisms involved in conscioussness
| and thought, it is even more likely that it will become
| intelligent once a critical threshold of complexity has been
| reached.
i'm sorry, but this fantasy of so many people today that somehow,
mysteriously, "intelligence" will "emerge" from "sufficient
complextity" is a bunch of speculative wishful thinking. i don't
know how so many people can buy into this superstition.
consider this:
Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of
the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin
with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the
world. Materialism thus begins with the thought of matter
or material processes. But, in doing so, it is already
confronted by two different sets of facts: the material world,
and the thoughts about it. The materialist seeks to make
these latter intelligible by regarding them as purely material
processes. He believes that thinking takes place in the brain,
much in the same way that digestion takes place in the
animal organs. Just as he attributes mechanical and organic
effects to matter, so he credits matter in certain circumstances
with the capacity to think. He overlooks that, in doing so, he
is merely shifting the problem from one place to another. He
ascribes the power of thinking to matter instead of to himself.
And thus he is back again at his starting point. How
does matter come to think about its own nature? Why is it
not simply satisfied with itself and content just to exist? The
materialist has turned his attention away from the definite
subject, his own I, and has arrived at an image of something
quite vague and indefinite. Here the old riddle meets him
again. The materialistic conception cannot solve the problem;
it can only shift it from one place to another.
(Rudolf Steiner, Chapter II, The Philosophy of Freedom)
| Given any system of sufficient complexity and flexibility we
| have the possibility of real intelligence arising as part of
| an emergent phenomenon. And since this system is designed to
| mimic known biological mechanisms involved in conscioussness
| and thought, it is even more likely that it will become
| intelligent once a critical threshold of complexity has been
| reached.
i'm sorry, but this fantasy of so many people today that somehow,
mysteriously, "intelligence" will "emerge" from "sufficient
complextity" is a bunch of speculative wishful thinking. i don't
know how so many people can buy into this superstition.
consider this:
Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of
the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin
with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the
world. Materialism thus begins with the thought of matter
or material processes. But, in doing so, it is already
confronted by two different sets of facts: the material world,
and the thoughts about it. The materialist seeks to make
these latter intelligible by regarding them as purely material
processes. He believes that thinking takes place in the brain,
much in the same way that digestion takes place in the
animal organs. Just as he attributes mechanical and organic
effects to matter, so he credits matter in certain circumstances
with the capacity to think. He overlooks that, in doing so, he
is merely shifting the problem from one place to another. He
ascribes the power of thinking to matter instead of to himself.
And thus he is back again at his starting point. How
does matter come to think about its own nature? Why is it
not simply satisfied with itself and content just to exist? The
materialist has turned his attention away from the definite
subject, his own I, and has arrived at an image of something
quite vague and indefinite. Here the old riddle meets him
again. The materialistic conception cannot solve the problem;
it can only shift it from one place to another.
(Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom)
I'm sorry but I must say that I don't understand why some people considered this previous post as "Insightful"!
It is as insightful as saying that because each of our individual neurons has no intelligence, their "collective intelligence" is limited by that, and therefore that the brain they form can not be intelligent at all!
I'm sorry but that's plain wrong, because we are dealing with a very complex system here, where the total can be much bigger than the sum of the parts.
The limitation to the collective intelligence of the bees (or ants) will be limited by then number of beesn and the number and speed of the interections they can have wich each other, which is clearly smaller and slower than the interections of the individual neurons of our brain.
Angel
I'm not sure I agree with this. I've been working with cooperative systems lately, and I have been surprized by the speed with which these systems solve problems. It seems that the fact that small adjustments to a proposed solution made by entities with only local information can rapidly improve the solution, provided that many (maybe only 20 or 30) entities suggest different changes, and the effect of the changes can be measured.
The really big surprize is that the quality of the changes does not have to be all that good. The system has much better behaviour than the individual entities would be able to manage alone.
Even if most of the actions (up to 80%) turn out to be useless or even damaging, the over all system state continues to improve. You may not call this intelligence, but the result is still really useful.
for off-topicism..
The entire british legal system fiercely protects privacy.. think you'll find the RIP bill and recent Demon ruling to be passing blips..
And as for the rest of it.. tchah.. just a reminder of why the rest of Europe considers America to be a nation of undereducated children.. no style, no class and thankfully short lives.. ('strue, you know.. we live longer over here)..
We also get (Europe) seeing as we invented/discovered them all..
Tv, Radio, DNA, vaccines, gravity, calculus, quantum physics, the computer, faxes (first one was installed in France in 1865).. I could go on..
Oh.. and any concepts of taste, style, listenable music and an education worth anything..
That to another form of intelligence, the emergent behaviour of a large network of associated neurons (you call it 'thinking') and that of a large number of associated bees might not seem to be so very far apart..
Bees haven't become more powerful than us simply because they have no great evolutionary pressures to drive that progression...
is here
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Old topics aren't new on Slashdot, but this is the first time I encounter one I personally know. A big article in one of the last issues of 'Scientific American' mentions this, and appearantly, timothy didn't care to mention the name of this technology is 'Swarm Intelligence', based on the idea of forming a large intelligent colony, of small dumb individuals. This sort of mechanism is not only in bee and ant colonies, but also found in the brain, where a 'neuron colony' forms an intelligent entity. Such networks were ALREADY developed, and employed in factories, scheduling algorithms, and network routing.
Perhaps agent software could do a funny dance too?
/L
You mean like a dancing paperclip?
Hmm, sounds familiar.....
I am more than the sum of my parts? Cool!
:-).
what if a technological system given the same level of complexity could demonstrate similar properties ?
What if this "conciousness/soul/whatever" you are talking about were just a certain level of complexity? Maybe we should just call 'consciousness' the level of complexity where we can't predict anymore what the response to certain input will be. We might want to exclude windows from that, though
How would you downscale 'consciousness'? E.g. is my dog conscious?
Could you maybe give (an) example(s) of what you would describe as a property of 'conciousness/soul/whatever' to clarify things a little?
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
Just a quick reply to show I check up on my posts.
...it's hard to see how a level of anything could introspect,...
I am not a native English speaker, so I'd like to ask what you mean by 'emergence'. Of course it's in my dictionary, but that doesn't help me much in this case. Do you mean the emerging of a property in a system that isn't in any of the parts seperately? If so, then *shrug* indeed. If not, enlighten me.
Introspection's just meta-thinking: thinking about thinking. Thinking is the processing of external input. Just feed the results into the machine again and we have introspection as I see it (I am open to different points of view, though).
There's also a problem with equating consciousness with unpredictability.
Hmmm, you're right. I wasn't making sense there.
intuitive notions of consciousness
That's just because these 'notions of consciousness' are expressed in bodylanguage similar (read: understandable) by humans.
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
(From Netcraft)
bolero.ics.uci.edu
bolero.ics.uci.edu is running Microsoft-PWS/3.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
NT4 or Windows 98 users include Gillette, Burger King, and Ford.
Something about knowing they use the same web server software as burger king makes me all fuzzy inside.
Ants use pheremone trails to find fairly optimized paths to food. Some researchers have adapter their strategy to route IP packets. They use 'pheremone bits' attached to the packets headers to get information about the networks. They then use the information to route packets more efficiently. As the network properties change the routing algorithm adapts. Supposedly, it works much better than the current method (which finds the shortest path - i think ?).
Some links: Computational Beauty of Nature
Mobile Software Agents for Dynamic Routing
I am loath to do this, because i hate to see posts like this. That post is not "Insightful" in any possible way. It has nothing to do with the article, hence it is "Off Topic", or possibly "Troll". Yes, i am also aware of the irony of posting to an Offtopic post.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Sure we want to build computer systems that emulate this kind of behaviour.
Maybe if you're Microsoft. Then again, this kind of behaviour is more reminiscent of their customers than their software (For which the analogy would be more like hearing a muffled bang as the ants' nest explodes and bursts into flames)
Rich
You missed a fundamental pun, radja. Think:
Nest of mice
Home of mice
Mouse pad?
-Owen
So exactly what happens when one of these gets a virus? Do we rest it and give it some chicken soup with lots of fluids? -- There is no sig.
Aah! no.
I mean like "mobile agents". What you've got are these bumblebees. They fly off looking for flowers and stuff. When one of them finds a particularly good bunch of flowers he flies back to the hive. Now because bees can't talk they need some way of communicating their findings to their fellow cohorts; so they do a special dance. which is actually a form of data communication, and passes on directions for finding the cool flower bed.
I'd like some cool agent software that could behave in a similar way. I certainly don't mean a stupid paper clip, but something that can relate back to me in some kind of efficient way. Either by talking, or prancing around. Even better, it could simply show me what it's found.
Hmmm, this Stilton cheese is *really* nice...
-- Cisk for the Cisk God
I like that funny little dance that bees do to show their comrades where the best flowers are.
That's pretty far out.
Perhaps agent software could do a funny dance too?
-- Cisk for the Cisk God
Fabulous, more dcti stats!
did arpa ever actuall destroy part of their network just to test it out (or just to let the researchers play with explosives) or were they sure that the charts and theories would hold?
"Slashdot effect"
You would think that they would learn by now to setup multiple mirror sites and redirect to those when something like this happens.
--
Star Trek vs Star Wars.
--
Star Trek vs Star Wars. Take a look. You may like it.
Need I say more?
Foreign ones for whom it's 11:20....
They are not talking about hooking bees and ants to the internet! They are trying to implement their communication protocols on electronic networks.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
wow, that's a pretty false statement. you seem to be saying that the behavior of a group of bees is necessarily a linear extrapolation of the behavior of a single bee. in looking at this sort of thing, it's been found that significant non-linearities exist.
'collective' intelligence is the only intelligence. whether it's the aggregate behavior of the neurons in your head or the bees in a colony or whatever, it's all part of emergent behavior. complex adaptive systems exhibit behaviors as a result of aggregating many simpler agents. a network that displays cas properties would be capable of making decisions based on what has worked well in the past and would be likely to work well in the future.
check out any book written by john holland for more information about cas and why a colony of ants is analogous to systems ranging from intracellular processes to human intelligence.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
I don't mean to change the subject, but this story was posted at 5:56 am and according to the news its 6:18, and this story already has 8 comments!
What geeks are up this early in the morning
that you're repetetive
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
lagtime
Parents Against Kuro5hin
Is that a nest of furry mice,
or a nest of input device mouses?
hrmm.. I wonder how they would manage to intergate this with eletronic circuitry? And being rather organic, what would the life span of it be?
IHMO, the issue is not biological-like network but neural network application.
Did you try neural nets?
It is pretty impressive how it can be used to solve problems for which no mathematical model is available.
I think biology can provide computer science many useful models and theories ; look at the beautiful "biological machines" god created (humans).
Don't you think we could learn from that to improve computer science ?
Actually, an article appeared on this topic a long time ago. Talk about a rip off...
One of the goals of the original ARPANET was to continue functioning even after large parts were destroyed - as might be the case in a nuclear conflict.
I think the Internet's routing protocols already contain a lot of the "hive" behavior these scientists are looking for.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
IIRC, it's about *exactly* what these guys are doing -- using simulated biologic agents (ants) to solve complex mathematical problems such as the Traveling Salesman problem and Internet network routing.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The furry kind :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
okok.. sorry about that.. english isn't my first language :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
and it is the computer used by Unseen University, Ankh-Morpork, Discworld. Just don't take away the nest of mice...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
They have been doing so for ages, as well as DNA computers and other such things. The main problem witha biological computer is that there is simply so much we don;t understand about the biological computer found inside everybodies head to even began to understand how to construct one from scratch.
Also there could be a danger in modelling existing computer technology on biological systems to the point where the tech reaches biological complexity. It sounds likea far out science fiction concept but as a biological system we humans are more than the sum of our parts, we show an emergent property known as conciousness/soul/whatever - what if a technological system given the same level of complexity could demonstrate similar properties ?
bing well
J
I am not a Frog. I am a Free Womble!
Collective "intelligence" isn't really intelligence at all. Just because bees communicate with each other doesn't mean they have the ability to reason. That's the key factor here - the ability to reason. Without the individual bees (or ants or whatever) being able to think and make inferences, collective intelligence is rather benign because it's limited by the bees' intelligence. A collective is only as intelligent as its individual members. If, however, bees were capable of reason, they might have become more powerful than we, for there is no question that a collective intelligence is superior *in design* than what we have in humans today.