Hacker News Reader

Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting direction. But what is the critical attribute of a swarm that would give rise to strong AI?

The argentine ant supercolony is an enormous swarm, but we don't really expect to be able to have a conversation with it, or see it deal with abstract concepts, but they can solve lots of local approximate optimization problems.

Slime molds are single cells but you might think of them as a swarm of nuclei and organelles that can solve hard optimization problems when in the right form, but again they don't seem like a general intelligence.

Is the missing piece that swarms must be of agents with certain properties? Or that the interactions between the members of a swarm need to have some specific properties?

View on HN

You raised some very valid questions. I'm speculating here, so take my answer as sort of sci-fi premise. I think as the internet and IoT grows, it becomes more decentralized, it will be come unfeasible for all these nodes to communicate to some central nodes (i.e. servers), so we will move toward automated peer-to-peer communication, with some simple routing and optimization rules.

These of these nodes automatically detect, connect, and communicate with the nearest node. Think of it as bluetooth vs wi-fi hybrid of the future. The aim is to make a more resilient internet by eliminating single points of failure (i.e. AWS servers down), but the end result will be some sort of rudimentary network, that will lead to "emergence" of some sort.

I just realized I've been describing "Edge computing".

I cannot imagine this happening in the world we live in.

I would not my IOT lightbulb (or worse, a camera) to communicate with my neighbor's house -- there are significant availability, privacy and security concerns.

The same way, I remember seeing lots of open WiFi networks, twenty years ago... and now they are virtually gone.

Instead, it would be still centralized servers, but with more reliability -- think fiber + 5G backup at home, and multi-region/cloudfare workers approach in the cloud.

There are precedents for this type peer-to-peer operation, where inherently limited protocols achieve a subset of functionality with acceptable privacy implications. For example, videogame distribution clients which download using a torrent-style process.

I believe there is an option to download/upload Windows updates in the same way.

Sure, but while the data is peer-to-peer, the control is fully central. Those clients are not going to be doing anything without command from main server.

I really don't think we get to decide if we allow this or not. A company like Cloudflare or any other edge computing provider is easily in the position to make this happen, for completely innocent and valid reasons.

What I'd like to emphasis is what I'm suggesting will be the unwanted side-effect of this type of peer-to-peer communication.

It'd still be pretty centralized though -- it will be like bittorrent, not like gnutella. Organizations want statistics and usage data. People want to be able to connect from anywhere, even when far from home.

Saving bandwidth is useful, but I see no future for de-centralized control. The control connection is cheap and allows a lot of things that would be hard with decentralized control -- health monitoring, staged rollouts, instance security updates. You can see this trend even today -- there are all service meshes like Tailscale, BeyondCorp-like distributed systems, hey, even Google Wifi -- which have central control and distributed data.

So even if something strange emerges, once it starts taking up non-trivial resources, it will be logged by central server, detected (by humans) as a bug, and killed with a routine firmware update.

Between the nodes and in their configuration [by lack of vocabulary] something like an n dimensional ink blob arrises. If this just happens to map reasonably to some n dimensional problem and the parameters of the swarm can be tweaked (evolve) to better map to it you can have logic with few moving parts. A simple example would be to first place the sugar pot in random locations until it ends up next to the coffee machine from where it migrates to the coffee table. The bags of sugar (to refill the pot) move around similarly.

I was on the same opinion as well. But I would like to borrow form Conway's Game of Life. The initial rules are simple, and to the untrained person, it just creates random blobs that disappear after a while. But then we have things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vgICfQawE

One more thing, I think the viability of communicating with an intelligence of a different kind is still an open question. It's speculated that intelligences that are too different in form or quantity might not be able to communicate with each other at all.

Likely the most probable scenario of our contact with extraterrestrial intelligence is they will completely ignore us, and will not attempt to communicate, or even if they attempt to, we will not perceive it as communication.

Communication needs to have purpose. Negotiating some kind of trade seems the way to go. We can provide ants with unimaginable "wealth" and they have unique skills that could be useful to us. Just not useful enough for us to make the effort?

What I wanted to suggest is even if this communication is possible. This question has been the main theme of two of Stanisław Lem's books, "His Master's Voice" and "Solaris".

Essentially, an intelligence can be so alien that the concept of communicating with it would be impossible.

You could get to that point if we inflate the value of our communication. This chat here might have (imaginary?) value to its participants but its absolute value is in application, if we are not going to do anything with it and the result is similar enough to not having the communication then we might as well [say] dance around the camp fire?

You could stretch the definition in the other direction too: if you crush an ant with your finger or put a spoon of honey next to their city you've communicated something. If you crush enough of them and they attack you we got ourselves an exchange in a language both parties understand.

I wouldn't attribute to much value to any definition that desires to define communication as an impossibility. Sure it could be done but such sour mind is best avoided.

The interesting property is embedded in the parent's use of the word "emerge" I think. It is the property of emergence that takes swarms of ants and forms an organized colony, or a network of nerves that creates intelligence.

I think it's something along the lines of.... randomized interactions of entities, constrained only by the attributes of the entities.

One thing that makes me think that is possible is Conway's Game of Life. The rules are simple, and on the face value, doesn't create anything exciting, but then we have this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vgICfQawE

But this is true of many things. The most interesting is computer itself.

The 6502 CPU only has 56 instructions. They are very simple, and on the face value, do not create anything exciting. But then, we have.. every program and game on Atari, Commodore 64, NES, Apple II.

Is there a quantitative difference between glider factory emerging from simple game of life rules, and incredible complexity of Elite game emerging from simple instructions of 6502?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com