04 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
Emergence in Board Games
Emergence is above all a product of coupled, context-dependent interactions. Technically these interactions, and the resulting system, are nonlinear: The behavior of the overall system cannot be obtained by summing the behaviors of its constituent parts. We can no more truly understand strategies in a board game by compiling statistics of the movements of its pieces than we can understand the behavior of an ant colony in terms of averages. Under these conditions, the whole is indeed more tha...Folksonomies: emergence board games
Folksonomies: emergence board games
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notes24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Think Bottom-Up
One of the most general shorthand abstractions that, if adopted, would improve the cognitive toolkit of humanity is to think bottom up, not top down. Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules that coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of energ...Michael Shermer on how understanding the world in terms of emergence can help us better understand it.
15 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
The Internet as a Brain
The brain is one of the most complex networks in the world, with more neurons than there are stars in the galaxy. Its hardware is a complex network of neurons; its software a complex network of memories. And so too is the Internet a network. Its hardware is a complex network of computers; its software a complex network of websites. There is a lot we can learn from the brain and it can tell us where the Internet is headed next.
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In practice, the Internet is clunkier, slower, and smaller...The question for me is: How do you detect the intelligence? If we are only interacting with neurons, how to we see the big picture?
15 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
The Internet as a Superorganism
If the cloud is a vast array of personal computer processors, then why not add your own laptop or desktop computer to it? It in a certain way it already is. Whenever you are online, whenever you click on a link, or create a link, your processor is participating in the yet larger cloud, the cloud of all computer chips online. I call this cloud the One Machine because in many ways it acts as one supermegacomputer.
The majority of the content of the web is created within this one virtual compu...Folksonomies: intelligence emergence
Folksonomies: intelligence emergence
Built from a gazillion chips coordinating to distribute content, memes, calculations.
15 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
The Internet as an Intelligence
If you build a machine that makes connections between everything, accumulates all the data in the world, and you then harness all available minds to collectively teach it where the meaningful connections and meaningful data are (Who is searching Whom?) while implementing deceptively simple algorithms that reinforce meaningful connections while physically moving, optimizing and replicating the data structures accordingly - if you do all this you will, from highly economical (yes, profitable) p...1 
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notesUnsourced quote from George Dyson. TODO: Find the source.
15 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
How Do You Find Emergent Intelligence on the Internet?
How would we know if there was an autonomous conscious superorganism? We would need a Turing Test for a global AI. But the Turing Test is flawed for this search because it is meant to detect human-like intelligence, and if a consciousness emerged at the scale of a global megacomputer, its intelligence would unlikely to be anything human-like. We might need to turn to SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for guidance. By definition, it is a test for non-human intelligence...How would you communicate with it? How would it reveal itself?
15 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
The Search for Internet Intelligence
While detecting an ET intelligence would overturn terrestrial religions forever, detecting a global internet intelligence would have wide-ranging ramifications for society. We'd have daily contact with an AI much larger than us, one that presumably would be steadily increasing in power every 18 months (Moore's Law). And this AI is embedded in the central nervous system of our global economy and culture. It's what we are connected to 24/7. It is also increasingly acts as our exo-brain. If it h...Notes on the search for a global intelligence in the Word Wide Web.
30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Our Collective Memory
Taken globally, the set of traces that we leave in the world does without doubt add up to something. It is through operations on sets of traces that I understand an event that I take part in. Tolstoy wrote about the foot soldier in the Napoleonic wars. The soldier he describes cannot have the experience of the war he is waging nor the battle he is fighting because the only “global” traces of the war are inscriptions—notably, maps and statistics. There is no scalable observation that mov... 1 notes
notesNo one soldier experiences a War. They experience details from their microcosm encounter with the war. The war itself is a collective memory experienced only in history books.
29 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Metric System Adoption Must be Emergent
Thanks for your petition.
There’s a lot of history here. Right after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson signed legislation that made it "lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system in all contracts, dealings or court proceedings." In 1875, the United States was one of the original 17 nations to sign the Treaty of the Metre. Since the 1890s, U.S. customary units (the mile, pound, teaspoon, etc.) have all been defined in terms of... 1 notes
notesThe government can't impose it's adoption, and can only encourage and enable it. Switching to the metric system must begin at home.
02 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Stand Alone Complex
Laughing Man: Who knew that copies could still be produced despite the absence of the original? If you had to give a name to this phenomenon, what would you label it?
Motoko: It would be "Stand Alone Complex"
Laughing Man: Yes, it's the stand alone complex. From the start the very nature of our current social system has contained the mechanisms to trigger such an amazing occurrence. Personally however, I feel this marks the beginning of a new era of despair. What's your opinion?
Motoko: I ... 1 notes
notesThe concept of many people getting the same idea, giving the appearance of either coordination or copycat behavior, but there is no originating even to copy.
