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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.
Um, given the choice between blowing up a communications facility and unplugging a cable, I'm willing to bet the testers went for the cable every time. (Despite the visceral thrill of blowing up your workplace.)
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
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
The current method is really... there is no method. Shortest path is desirable, but not always the case.
An individual router or group of routers will use various protocols to determine 'best' interface for a given packet to take (which is not always shortest)
There is no real discovery of which path is currently the fastest
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!
don't feel pain (which probably isn't an emotion, BTW)...
No I think the whole pleasure/pain thing is a far more instinctive reward/punishment system related to the fight/flight/fuck reactions of an organism. You certainly don't need to be anywhere close to sapient to experiance them.
The primary emotions -- anger, sadness, happiness, loneliness, boredom, fear, etc -- all have important cognitive roles that AI's would very likely need to function.
It's not often I hear this view, but it's one I agree with. I have a sneaking suspicion that an artificial intelligence will have a lot more human characteristics than we'd expect from a "mere machine". There are valid reasons for our emotions and we would be a lot less functional without them. I think that their analogues in AI will arise spontaneously with sapience, and separating one from the other will be impossible.
So the answer to your first question is no, you cannot transform a TM into an NN. You are right, however, that essentially what they did (I have to be careful here, I have never read the original paper) was to construct a neural net for AND, OR, etc and show how to connect them.
I have to say that in a purely theoretical sense neural networks with continuous (say sigmoid) activation function (not M-P!) have been shown to be at least Turing equivalent (and in fact more powerful). However to encode a TM into an NN you have to use infinite precision real numbers and any such encoding is inherently unstable. The basic problem is that NN has limited capacity to store information. So you have to use decimal (or binary) expansions of the states, which are real numbers to store the data for you in an artificial fashion.
So the final answer is that you cannot build a TM out of pure NNs. However (and I believe there was work on it) you can hope that a suitable combination of memory storage and a neural net can be Turing equivalent in a practical sense.
And who is to say that our brain is Turing equivalent!
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.