intelligence

Michael Crichton has based his latest novel "Prey" on a concept called rule based agents. It basically states that a group of entities, each acting on a certain set of rules and having a certain amount of memory, interact with each other and evolve to come up with solutions; which at times are truly out-of-the-box.

What's interesting is that among these agents, there is no single agent which commands and controls how the entire group or each agent ought to work. It is plain, simple interaction and mutual understanding based on a set of rules implanted in them, based on what type of problem they ought to solve. Mind you, these are not a set of rules which, if followed, would lead you to the solution. These are probably rules which tell the agents what situations are illegal( something like division by zero).

The best example of the power of this concept would be wikipedia and the open source movement. I don't think i would have to elaborate on how rapidly things have progressed with these two. Even colonies of ants and bees act as rule based agents ( the queen in this case is nominal. She doesn't direct any ant. However the basic rule implanted in the ants psyche is that she should be protected at all costs). Individual cells of our bodies are all programmed to grow and reproduce before they die. As mentioned in my previous post, it also seems that we all work for the sustenance of the human race.

Though examples of this kind abound everywhere around us, we also come across in our natural world, solutions born out of a completely different and contracdictory concept: heirarchy. This is something people are probably more familiar with and can relate to better. We see heirarchy at work in basically all forms of governance; be it in school, corporates, society, governments, groups of mammals ( pride of lions, herd of elephants etc ). What's intriguing is that entities which are quite small and therefore have very small or almost no brain at all, rely on the rule based agents concept to survive. And man, do they do it in style... the sheer complexity of how the entire system of a mammal works would certainly get even the brightest of people scratching their heads...and this seems to be almost perfect. Yet as we go higher up, we find species having bigger brains and bigger memories, signs of greater intelligence....this ideally should have translated into more complex and amazing ways for survival. But alas, here we see the heirarchial mentality creeping in.

Question: Does heirarchy come into play when there is an element of fear? Or is it the most natural way of problem solving?

Deciding which system is better suited for problem solving is debatable. Whatever the case may be, we live in a world which runs on these two powerful yet completely contradictory concepts, and have been doing so since ages....without a hitch!!!

Adieu to gvc

Tuesday was my last day at gvc.
Though still with cogni,
I am about to embark on something i thought was unlikely.
Call it fate , call it destiny,
but even before I joined JSS as a trainee,
I was asked to go to coimbatore to get trained in ess-ae-pee.
What followed was a dream turned reality;
Met a great gang at the academy
who never studied JAVA played CS constantly
My entry into ASG
and befriending a great set of people subsequently
was truely a gift from the almighty.
But tuesday happened to be the last day at gvc;
life looked good @ ess-ae-pee.
food free, transport free, expresso capuccino biscuits free
Ah! fulfillment of a long standing fantasy!!!!
Yet keeping up with lifes irony,
i was sad, for it was my last day @gvc
All my friends, when will i next see?
but hey, that is how it will always be
in the past distance has separated me
from some very good friends from school,college and RV
i had to move on, my heart sad and heavy

This is Life's irony!!!
What is joy without a little sorrow?

silence

Silence speaks a thousand words
Though speaking aloud
Makes you heard.
But when words fail to convey
What your heart wants to say
It is silence
Who makes its voice heard.
At times its presence
Seems discomforting

life began thus for me
today minus years twenty three
wading through rocks and stone
I stand here, nothing but flesh and bone.

Striving hard, that one purpose to find
To quench that longing thirst of mind
For without it, in lonely despair I wait
To peacefully enter the pearly gates.

Hope and faith, its all what i have
In destiny and in God above
Life in retrospect does seem empty
For a man who had ambitions plenty.

With broken armour I go from here
Not knowing if my end is far or near
This battle lost, but still keeps on going
To reach a target of no knowing

humanity- an organism?

The local newspaper carried a small article about a guy who died in a road accident. It so happened that this young chap happened to be an old classmate of mine, one with whom I was quite friendly, but over the years, as distance and careers had separated us, did not have much contact with. Nevertheless, I thought that i should attend his funeral.

The whole exercise went on as usual, with the body being brought, the funeral service being offered, the body being buried and relatives and friends weeping and wailing inconsolably for they had lost a son, a grandson, a lover, a friend ; death at 23 years was probably too hard for them. In any case, for me, all these things were expected. But the seemingly usual things which followed after the funeral, for some reason, got me thinking.

What happened was that after the funeral, I went home, switched on the T.V. , had my dinner, and thought: His death has not changed the way I live, it probably will not change the way of life of the hundreds of other people who had attended his funeral. Such would be the case with almost every other person on this planet. What then, is the purpose of birth, the struggle through life, and death? This cycle has been happening since the beginning proabably will continue forever.

What got me wondering was that this whole system seems so mechanical, so predictable, so mathematical. If one were to look at the entire human population from the outside, it would seem that the entire mass of humanity behaves as an organism; where each human being would become an individual cell. Continous birth and increasing population would represent the growth of the organism( in this case, the human population) and death of individuals are synonymous with degeneration, which occurs with any cell. Given this observation, one direct implication would be that we, the cells of this organism, are born , and live for the sole purpose of developing and nourishing the organism of which we are a part of. It is our biological responsibility to ensure that our lives our spent in trying the best that we can, to ensure that this organism lives.

That however would raises serious questions. Where does our individuality go? Do our own individual lives matter? Why do we seek happiness, peace, love? Is it only to ensure that we can work better towards our biological goal, or is it deeper? If all of us are sad, unhappy and depressed, would that mean the organism would tread the path of self destruction? ARE WE PROGRAMMED?