Tom AustinPhysorg has a news piece on artificial rats. This might seem whimsical (or the subject for a “Golden Fleece” award unless you apply a lot of converging threads.
This piece is about rat-like robots. It brings to mind, Rodney Brooks’ work at MIT on the elegance of simple robots.
What this article doesn’t go into is the social nature of rats.
Nor is it clear that they are working with machine learning algorithms – indeed, they may be using different approaches.
But put all this together. Brooks’ elegance. Hawkins’ work on Hierarchical Temporal Memory as well as a lot of other great work on machine learning. What we think we know about principles of social behavior in rattus rattus.
(Maybe this is too advanced. Maybe we should be looking at bees or ants.)
Create collections of AI-rats that socialize through various mechanisms to provide a test bed for exploiting the collective intelligence of simple social organisms (think termite mounds in Africa)
If we had enough available capacity in the cloud, shouldn’t we be able to build self-training, self-organizing networks of communities of rats in the cloud (or bees or …) to better test what we believe are underlying social (and, by extension, economic) models?
Have any of you come across research (or research plans) to run large scale social simulations (that require cloud-class resources) to test out social models like this, simulations based on the principles above?
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
1 response so far ↓
1 Lori Kane July 28, 2009 at 2:54 pm
My doctoral dissertation research might qualify, although I didn’t “run large scale social simulations.” I did case study research of a self-organizing group of employees in a business and a self-organizing group of teachers in a school.
Kane, L. (2008). Fostering the Emergence of Self-Organizing Work Groups. Seattle University.
I’m wrapping up a more concise book on the subject now, since even my mom doesn’t want to read a 600-page dissertation.
Lori