From
Emergence by Steven Johnson:
The brilliance of Selfridge's new paradigm lay in the fact that it relied on a distributed, bottom-up intelligence, and not a unified, top-down one. Rather than build a single smart program, Selfridge created a swarm of limited miniprograms, which he called demons. "The idea was, we have a bunch of these demons shrieking up the hierarchy," he explains. "Lower-level demons shrieking to higher-level demons shrieking to higher ones."To understand what the "shrieking" means, imagine a system with twenty-size individual demons, each trained to recognize a letter of the alphabet. The pool of demons is shown a series of words, and each demon "votes" as to whether each letter displayed represents its chosen letter. If the first letter is a, the a-recognizing demon reports that it is highly likely that it has recognized a match. ...
Selfridge was a colleague of Marvin Minsky's. There are some interesting similarities between Minsky's
Society of Mind approach and what Selfridge describes here. I have also toyed with similar ideas for a distributed cellular automata, which I referred to as a Newell machine. I referred to Newell because he was the inventor of the
rule base, but in the original description of his rule base, it seemed like he described the rules as firing themselves. This inspired me to think about a transformation system in which there were defined a group of agents. Each agent would have two properties. One would be a pattern, on finding the pattern, the agents sends would apply a transformation (their second property). The transformations would be defined by very simple rules, ideally these would be rules similar to cellular automata. There would be a common space, modifiable by all agents. The agents would scan through the common space in any reasonable fashion and
fire when they came across their pattern, a semaphore would need to determine the ordering of the firing agents should two or more fire at once. However, after being granted permission from the semaphore, an agent finding its pattern would apply its transformation to the common space. The cumulative results, at least in my mind, would be a sort of asynchronous cellular automata.
