Helping the Internet think faster - New technology enables high-speed data transfer

Editor's note: Signal speed is a significant factor in a brain's intelligence. Consciousness is a function of the rapidity of communication between networks of neurons. This being said, cannot increases in date transfer speeds between computer networks be seen as a harbinger, or prerequisite, of consciousness and intelligence springing forth from the ether?

PhysOrg.com - June 18, 2009

GridFTP, a protocol developed by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, has been used to transfer unprecedented amounts of data over the Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which provides a reliable, high-performance communications infrastructure to facilitate large-scale, collaborative science endeavors.

The Argonne-developed system proved key to enabling research groups at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California to move large data sets between the facilities at a rate of 200 megabytes per second.

"The data tsunami problem has been a major bottleneck to scientific advancement," said Raj Kettimuthu, technical lead and technology coordinator of the GridFTP project at Argonne. "With GridFTP computational scientists can analyze their simulated and derived data in real time."

The deployment of GridFTP at the two computing facilities is part of a major project to optimize wide-area network data transfers between sites hosting DOE leadership-class computers.

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Terminator Salvation Time? - Could the net become self-aware?

New Scientist - April 30, 2009, by Michael Brooks

The internet's network structure is similar to that of the human brain (Image: ImageSource / Getty)

Yes, if we play our cards right - or wrong, depending on your perspective.

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".

Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. "Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than a jump to a wholly different level," Heylighen says.

How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

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Software warriors - Colonies of 'Cybots' May Defend Government Networks

FoxNews.com - March 5, 2009, by Joshua Rhett Miller

A video capture of UNTAME, depicting "near real-time network discovery, topology mapping, and monitoring," according to Trien.

The Cybot Age could soon be upon us. But be not afraid; this isn't Star Trek. We're not talking droves of evil cyborgs bent on galaxy domination.

If all goes as planned, in just a few years colonies of software robots -- "cybots" -- linked into a "hive" mind could be defending the largest computer systems in America against network intruders.

Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory say the program behind the cybots — Ubiquitous Transient Autonomous Mission Entities (UNTAME) — will be very different from current cybersecurity systems.

Joe Trien, who leads the team at the lab's Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, said what will make cybots so useful is that they will be able to form groups, function autonomously and respond almost immediately.

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God's shrinking domain? - Origin of Life On Earth: Scientists Unlock Mystery Of Molecular Machine

ScienceDaily - March 1, 2009

A major mystery about the origins of life has been resolved. According to a study published in the journal Nature, two Université de Montréal scientists have proposed a new theory for how a universal molecular machine, the ribosome, managed to self-assemble as a critical step in the genesis of all life on Earth.

"While the ribosome is a complex structure it features a clear hierarchy that emerged based on basic chemical principles," says Sergey Steinberg, a Université de Montréal biochemistry professor who made his discovery with student Konstantin Bokov. "In the absence of such explanations, some people could imagine unseen forces at work when such complex structures emerge in nature."

What is a ribosome?

The ribosome is an enormous molecule responsible for translating the messages carried in the genetic code of all organisms into the workhorse molecules of the cell – proteins – that carry out all functions, including replicating the genome itself. As the world celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of the Father of Evolution, Charles Darwin, Prof. Steinberg's theory brings the scientific community even deeper into the study of the origins of life.

By examining the molecular self-organizing processes that preceded the living cell, the point where time begins for biologists, Prof. Steinberg goes further than Darwin and the many evolutionary biologists who followed could have imagined

By the standards of biological molecules, ribosomes are immense. Though visible only through lenses of the most powerful microscopes, comparing most other biological molecules to this behemoth is like comparing a tricycle to a jumbo jet. Having spent years gazing at the detailed structure of the ribosome, Prof. Steinberg pondered how such an immense and complex structure could have assembled itself from smaller building blocks that existed on the early Earth.

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The Power of an Algorithm - New tool enables powerful data analysis

PhysOrg.com - January 8 2009

After using the algorithm to determine the filament structure of an aerogel -- a lightweight foam used in shielding electronic equipment in satellites -- the researchers were able to compute changes to its structural integrity by the simulated impact of a micrometeorite traveling at 10,000 miles per hour (red sphere on left). Image: Attila Gyulassy/UC Davis Copyright UC Regents

A powerful computing tool that allows scientists to extract features and patterns from enormously large and complex sets of raw data has been developed by scientists at University of California, Davis, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The tool - a set of problem-solving calculations known as an algorithm - is compact enough to run on computers with as little as two gigabytes of memory.

The team that developed this algorithm has already used it to probe a slew of phenomena represented by billions of data points, including analyzing and creating images of flame surfaces; searching for clusters and voids in a virtual universe experiment; and identifying and tracking pockets of fluid in a simulated mixing of two fluids.

"What we've developed is a workable system of handling any data in any dimension," said Attila Gyulassy, who led the five-year development effort while pursuing a PhD in computer science at UC Davis. "We expect this algorithm will become an integral part of a scientist's toolbox to answer questions about data."

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Robotic ants building homes on Mars?

ITC Results - October 21, 2008

Recent discoveries of water and Earth-like soil on Mars have set imaginations running wild that human beings may one day colonise the Red Planet. However, the first inhabitants might not be human in form at all, but rather swarms of tiny robots.

“Small robots that are able to work together could explore the planet. We now know there is water and dust so all they would need is some sort of glue to start building structures, such as homes for human scientists,” says Marc Szymanski, a robotics researcher at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.

Szymanski is part of a team of European researchers developing tiny autonomous robots that can co-operate to perform different tasks, much like termites, ants or bees forage collaboratively for food, build nests and work together for the greater good of the colony.

Working in the EU-funded I-SWARM project, the team created a 100-strong posse of centimetre-scale robots and made considerable progress toward building swarms of ant-sized micro-bots. Several of the researchers have since gone on to work on creating swarms of robots that are able to reconfigure themselves and assemble autonomously into larger robots in order to perform different tasks. Their work is being continued in the Symbrion and Replicator projects that are funded under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme.

Planet exploration and colonisation are just some of a seemingly endless range of potential applications for robots that can work together, adjusting their duties depending on the obstacles they face, changes in their environment and the swarm’s needs.

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A Robot Network Seeks to Enlist Your Computer

The New York Times - October 20, 2008, by JOHN MARKOFF

REDMOND, Wash. — In a windowless room on Microsoft’s campus here, T. J. Campana, a cybercrime investigator, connects an unprotected computer running an early version of Windows XP to the Internet. In about 30 seconds the computer is “owned.”

An automated program lurking on the Internet has remotely taken over the PC and turned it into a “zombie.” That computer and other zombie machines are then assembled into systems called “botnets” — home and business PCs that are hooked together into a vast chain of cyber-robots that do the bidding of automated programs to send the majority of e-mail spam, to illegally seek financial information and to install malicious software on still more PCs.

Botnets remain an Internet scourge. Active zombie networks created by a growing criminal underground peaked last month at more than half a million computers, according to shadowserver.org, an organization that tracks botnets. Even though security experts have diminished the botnets to about 300,000 computers, that is still twice the number detected a year ago.

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5 Prophecies about Artificial Intelligence

Popular Mechanics - October 16, 2008, by Erik Sofge

MACHINES WILL NEVER ACHIEVE HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

According to Wright, one of the main benefits of the quest for AI is a better definition of human intelligence. "Intelligence is whatever we can do that computers can't," says Wright

YOUR SIM WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU (KIND OF)

Wright believes that computers, whether they're artificially intelligent or not, will learn about humans in order to become more effective. "Computers are going to have to build very elaborate models of humans," says Wright.

GAMES WILL WRITE THEMSELVES

In the future, Wright sees plot-driven videogames—which he sees as an unfortunate result of "film envy"—giving way to a kind of personalized gaming experience, based on a computer's ability to read you.

HIVE MINDS WILL BE LOTS OF FUN

As computers continue to seek more data on human behavior and more accurate models of humans, Wright predicts that they'll begin to compare notes.

MACHINES WILL BOOT-STRAP THEIR WAY TO SENTIENCE

Hive minds sound relatively harmless when they're toiling away at tailor-made videogames for human leisure time. But in Wright's future, computers will progress towards something far more powerful and inherently alien.

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Google's quest for the intelligent cloud

CNET News - September 18, 2008 by Dan Farber

Google is publishing a series of brief articles by ten of its top scientists on how the Internet will evolve in the next ten years. In the first article, Alfred Spector, a vice president of engineering and research scientist Franz Och, outline how Google's search engine will evolve over the next decade.

Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.

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Predicting the Path to AI

As they say, hindsight has perfect vision. It is a simple matter to look back after an event takes place and recreate the path of steps that led up to that event. It is much more difficult to see that path in advance. When AI is born, assuming that such an event would be immediately apparent, and assuming that it has not yet occurred, what path will it have taken? Will cloud computing and data centers turn out to have been a crucial fork in the road?

IBM and Google have announced a joint initiative to build large data centers that will allow students and researchers to participate in remote "cloud computing," at term that refers to the combined use of thousands of processors, vast libraries of data, and specialized software that "scour the Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and insights."

As these cloud computing centers are created and more and more resources are injected into their ever-increasing capacities, will a crucial threshold be attained? It has been theorized that consciousness is an inevitable outcome when a sufficient degree of processing complexity is reached. Are we on a path to the inevitable emergence of a conscious Internet? If this is indeed what happens, remember where you heard it first. Stay tuned.

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Exploring Swarm Theory

As promised, I have been searching the Internet for the latest news about emergent complexity. I found this fascinating article on National Geographic written by Peter Miller.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

That is fascinating, you say, but how does it affect the price of rice in China? It turns out that building computer models of ant behavior and swarm intelligence is allowing researchers to solve real-world problems.

In Houston, for example, a company named American Air Liquide has been using an ant-based strategy to manage a complex business problem. The company produces industrial and medical gases, mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, at about a hundred locations in the United States and delivers them to 6,000 sites, using pipelines, railcars, and 400 trucks. Deregulated power markets in some regions (the price of electricity changes every 15 minutes in parts of Texas) add yet another layer of complexity.

So they built a computer model based on the behavior of ants.

Ants had evolved an efficient method to find the best routes in their neighborhoods. Why not follow their example? So Air Liquide combined the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, and truck routing—millions of possible decisions and outcomes a day. Every night, forecasts of customer demand and manufacturing costs are fed into the model.

"It takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have," Harper says. "But at six o'clock every morning we get a solution that says how we're going to manage our day."

For truck drivers, the new system took some getting used to. Instead of delivering gas from the plant closest to a customer, as they used to do, drivers were now asked to pick up shipments from whichever plant was making gas at the lowest delivered price, even if it was farther away.

"You want me to drive a hundred miles? To the drivers, it wasn't intuitive," Harper says. But for the company, the savings have been impressive. "It's huge. It's actually huge."

Another application of swarm intelligence uses the flocking actions of birds in flight.

A team of robots that could coordinate its actions like a flock of birds could offer significant advantages over a solitary robot. Spread out over a large area, a group could function as a powerful mobile sensor net, gathering information about what's out there. If the group encountered something unexpected, it could adjust and respond quickly, even if the robots in the group weren't very sophisticated, just as ants are able to come up with various options by trial and error. If one member of the group were to break down, others could take its place. And, most important, control of the group could be decentralized, not dependent on a leader.

This field is just getting started, and the applications to come defy imagination. How much do you want to bet that there's swarm intelligence in the brain's huge collection of neurons? Stay tuned.

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Emergent Complexity and Biological Engineering: 21st Century Science

I have decided to add two fields of scientific research and development to my roster of subjects to keep up with on my Singularity Blog. As we have established a beachhead on the shores of the 21st century, these two fields have become, as some would put it, the new new things. As I continue to comb through large quantities of articles on current developments in order to bring to my readers relevant and interesting news, I will be including these two topics: Emergent Complexity and Biological Engineering.

Whereas, not too long ago, creationists were able to convince many that the complexity of life could not be explained by science and must therefore remain the province of a Creator, this realm alas has joined so many others in falling to the advancing armies of scientific investigation. Emergent complexity is now understood to show that complex systems do emerge naturally out of a large number of simple interactions, with no need for a controlling entity. With a few very simple rules for each ant to follow, the complex behavior of the colony emerges. The complex shapes of snowflakes emerge out of the simple interactions of water molecules. A flock of birds moves and shifts in the sky in highly complex and coordinated fashion, using only the simple rules followed by each bird. These are examples of emergent complexity. What does this have to do with Singularity?

As we build computers that approach the level of complexity of the human brain, the question arises: Is consciousness the natural result of complexity? When we are able to build systems with as many connections between transistors as there are synapses in the brain, will the first sentient machine be born? No matter what anyone thinks is the answer, we will all find out soon enough.

Bioengineering is coming to the forefront of science only recently, since we are approaching a degree of understanding and technological wizardry wherein we can engineer and transform our own biology. Of course a nightmare scenario will immediately come to mind, thanks to Mary Shelley, but we hope for better things, such as the eradication of genetic disease and even death itself.

So onward we go, and I hope you'll come along for the ride.

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