Self-Assembling Networks 112
prostoalex writes "Researchers from Humboldt University found a way to build self-assembling networks. By emulating the behavior of ants and insects the team, which is led by Frank Schweitzer, demonstrated a simulation where agent-based architecture was able to quickly assemble itself into a network and quickly react to a broken link or damages. Schweitzer's research papers are available off his personal Web site. The scientific paper referred in the original article, Self-Assembling of Networks in an Agent-Based Model is available off Cornell server."
this isn't news (Score:2, Informative)
The article was posted to his web site in 1999 and this is front-page stuff? And the article itself was published in 1997. Stop the presses!
Re:Self-assembling intelligence next? (Score:5, Informative)
It turns out that already today all successful applications of socalled "artificial intelligence" are self assembling.
In the first approaches to artificial intelligence [mq.edu.au] people used programming languages to obtain systems that generate intelligent or at least apparently intelligent behavior.
All newer [utexas.edu] approaches to artificial intelligence start with a large number of very simple units that, learning from data from the real world, develop specific patterns of connections. Many models even develop their own structure in such a way.
From my perspective is intelligence as well as artificial intelligence only possible in a system that can self-structure.
Re:Self-assembling intelligence next? (Score:3, Informative)
And what does "self-assembling" or "self-organizing" mean, really? The utexas link is pointing to a bunch of machine learning stuff (I research and publish in AI, sometimes in machine learning) that is frankly quite out of date (no kernel machines, SVMs, or any recent clustering techniques). Unsupervised learning can be seen as some sort of self-organization, but it's certainly not the basis of "all successful applications" of A.I.
The claim that "a number of simple units" being organized into some structure is somehow self-organizing is just plain bizarre. Your computer's memory is a big collection of bits being organized by the programs run. The neural nets, Bayes nets, self-organizing maps, etc. listed on that link are not independent agents communicating to form a structure. They are variables in a program, plain and simple, with one big algorithm massaging them into something useful. True, they might exploit local relationships between certain members (e.g. Bayes nets) but so do many algorithms. You might just as well call QuickSort self-organizing.
Depending on your definition, self-organizing computer systems are either so common as to be uninteresting, or so rare that we pretty much never see them in practical applications.
I know it it's "cool" to see this stuff as some sort of biological meta-machine, but to suggest that this is the only useful viewpoint, or even the dominant one, is simply ridiculous.