Has anyone seen a good packet storm? That's when some router tables get mucked up and packets don't find their destination. I was working in the middle of the night at Power Computing which had a bunch of very chatty macs and it was amazing to watch the buildup and growth of traffic in the router traffic. We had a to get our work completed by the next day and as the hours passes our ability to do any thing on the network kept getting worse. Finally I had to call IS and we did the thing IS always does to fix stuff. We turned on and off all the routers in the room. That took about twenty minutes. The lights all went back to a very normal quiet state for 4 in the morning. It was amazing to watch.
Emergent intelligence in the Net?.
Phil Wainewright: Spontaneous intelligence and the Semantic Web. "the only way intelligence gets into a computer is as a result of humans putting it there."
My first reaction was to endorse that statement wholeheartedly. Upon thinking a bit more about it, I think I'd be more comfortable with a more restrictive statement such as "the Semantic Web will not by itself generate intelligence beyond what humans put into it".
I think spontaneous intelligence might pop up in other computer-related areas. For instance, as the Internet grows into a more and more biological-like system, we might begin to notice large-scale patterns of behavior emerge that were not planned by the designers. (Actually I'm not sure that this hasn't already happened, e.g. in router networks.) If some of these patterns turn out to have a recognizable function, they might be construed as evidence of intelligence. [Seb's Open Research]
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